Evaluation question 4

Blogger

The research stage of our film used many new media technologies consisting mostly of internet sites such as Blogger, Youtube, the BBFC's website and many more independent websites hosting more alternative content.

Although Blogger is a free platform owned by technology giant Google it does have some flaws. It handles images very poorly when inserted into a post and work is only accessible with an internet connection so sometimes it wasn't possible to check the blog and complete any tasks. 


The internet is vast so being specific in my searches was a must or I could easily be given wrong results that would be in no way related or helpful to our film.  The internet was a great tool for comparing shots in films and also looking for good examples of shots within films, a great example of parrallel editing I found in a clip of the Godfather on YouTube. 



A similar approach to The Godfather but ours has dialogue bridged between all the separate shots which aids continuity and the immersion of our film. The non-digetic sound of Laura talking while out of shot and Matt packing the bag allows the audience to see story develop with Matt going away and Laura's troubles.This also made it easier to stay within the films short time constraint as the bag packing and phone calls are crucial to the plot and a montage or time lapse of these shots would lose key information to the storyline. 

Not only did I research specific shots I also researched what makes a successful movie poster and radio trailer through the use of websites such as Web designer depot.


 

This gave me some insight of things to include on my poster and the groups final poster. 

YouTube was a great resource for finding radio trailers for all genres of films, such as vintage horror Squirm, and more modern box office hits such as Star Wars.

To gather feedback from our potential audience we used Google Docs and its features that allow surveys to be carried out and data automatically graphed and displayed so its easier to digest.The surveys were handed out by email and social media sites such as Facebook, this made it easier for people to access them and easy for us to gather feedback as these platforms are free.
 

Our planning stage used many technologies such as Celtx, online storyboards, Microsoft Word and social media sites such as Facebook to communicate, Facebook offers a group chat function that allows us all to talk simultaneously which is far superior to options such as email. 

The storyboard used was based online, it was really simple to sign up for and was a free service. This helped us create our scenes in a less restrictive space compared to a shotlist which is text only.

The shotlist software was Microsoft word and its table feature that allowed for easy organisation of clear information. But a problem with Word is sometimes that it becomes unresponsive and often crashes; meaning regular saves and backups were needed to prevent data loss.



Construction
Our construction stage used many new technologies, mainly software such as Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro

, which are industry standard programs and greatly helped us craft a professional product. Photoshop was our main image editor that we made our final and individual film posters in, 
although the learning curve for Photoshop is steep it is a great program and has limitless possibilities to create pixel based graphics. Photoshop operates with layers allowing for the building of shapes and objects, this is a really simple mechanic that made making our splash screen and final poster much simpler as we could edit each layer accordingly. We also made our title splash screen in Photoshop which was also used in the main promotional poster for our film. It's easy to experiment within Photoshop as individual layer's visibility can be toggled on and off with small "eye" next to the layer. This means it's not a complete reimplementation of an effect on a new layer as its possible it can be toggled of to compare two possible effects on separate layers. 

Photoshop's layers allowing for easy organisation.

Although Photoshop has layers it is good practice to name them as the work is developed as if not it can get very confusing. Although I, the designer of the poster, know what each layer corresponds to another member of my group may not and would be very difficult for them to figure out which layer is which and make any adjustments to the poster if needed in short notice and I wasn't around. But this can all be avoided with simply naming layers. It is up to the document creator to keep on top of the layers so its easier for colleagues to take over the project if need be. See the before and after of the naming of layers.

before naming and organising

After naming and organising

Focus pull

Premiere Pro is standard in the film production industry, again it is a software with a steeper learning curve for the more advanced features but this makes more things possible. Using the industry standard software allows development of skills that would carry over to different projects, upon evaluation of the film again it would be in our interest to better utilise some of Premiere's features such as colour correction and slow-motion. One disadvantage to this software is its complexity, the software took a lot of learning and understanding to use, this would have been prevented if it wasnt as complicated.

The camera was a Canon Legria HFG25 which is a professional level camera, this helped us achieve a rich spectrum of colour compared to an amateur camera and also allowed the use of advanced techniques such as a focus pull in our title sequence. Tripods were used throughout the film and aided to keep the camera steady which is a good feature as shaky hand-filmed footage would be distracting to the viewer and ruin their immersion in the film.


A 75GB hard drive was dedicated to our films on each pc we used. This allowed us to easily store multiple versions of our film locally as well as leaving ample room for all the shots as they, in their uncompressed format, were very large files.

In my evaluation stages I used different word processors and slideshow software such as  Powerpoint and Blogger. These were useful as they allow me to incorporate many different types of media into my evaluations. But Blogger has some problems handling such media as it can disrupt text formatting and the pictures can sometimes dissapear from the blog post, the formatting on text is also frustrating to use as the formatting sometimes applies itself to unrelated text or the formatting carries on when new text is started. Powerpoint was good as it was possible to embed them into blog posts using a website called SlideShare which is free to use and make an account and upload a Powerpoint. They also have handy features such as spellcheck to ensure all words are being spelt correctly and titles and subheadings which allows for easy organisation of information making it easier to digest for the reader.