Thanks to Web 2.0, people all over the world can contact each other, share work, stories, blogs, thoughts and ideas that help revolutionize the media industry today. These are programmes such as facebook, myspace, blogger, tumblr, youtube and flickr. During the creating of this media project, I have surfed all of those mentioned sites and more to socialise, speak to professionals, analyse others work, post my own, and research.
The main idea for this project was to create an idea for a horror film, research, market it through print format media, and then film and edit the main piece. This gives you a slight insight into the world of film production and allows you to see what the process is like. This is obviously not how it works in real life, as there are so many more ways that a production company would market a movie, but it gives you a very little taster into filming, editing, and creating.
First of all, in the research stage, we used Youtube as a source for finding our trailers to analyse. In this, the main trailer we focussed on was that of "The Strangers", and we did so by watching it countless times, reading reviews on IMDB, and doing a Mise-en-scene, Camera, Editing and Sound check on the trailer. Also, after we had finished producing the trailer, we uploaded it to Youtube to see if we get any feedback, and so we could screen it in class. We did so twice, once with a draft and not completely finished version, and then the finished version called "Diederich Final".
Throughout the entire process, every member of the media cohort used blogger to upload any research material or planning there group had done for assessment. This is where our work will actually be assessed rather than just the standard paper, and folders like we are used to in high school. This embraces the use of technology, being media students of course.
The next part came the filming. This required us to hire out a camera from the college audio/visual department along with buying a tape for £2.50, a tripod, and all the leads required for charging and connecting to the computer.
One thing about the camera, is that there is only up to an hour of battery life possible, meaning that if we wanted to film for a long amount of time, we would have to either plug it in, or keep switching it off after each scene.
The camera was pretty easy to operate. Turn it on, hit record when you want to record, and then switch to edit/play mode when you want to view it, or change the position of the tape. This made our filming process alot easier.
A helpful function on the camera was the night vision mode. This allowed us to create even more scarier scenes, by turning the lights out and filming in the dark. As i said before, anything can happen in the dark, so it was a case of trial and error really.
Then it came to editing. For this we would use the program Final Cut Pro. First of all we had to set up the functions of the camera and the capturing mode, and then we were able to start. As we had trialed Final Cut before, we had a vague idea of how to use it, so it was different trying to learn new things, but it's always good, developing your skills, and broadening your knowledge. Capturing was pretty easy, plugging in your camera, and syncing the footage to the camera, all at the push of two buttons. 1. Play on the camera, and 2. Capture now, on the mac.
Once the footage was captured, we could start editing, and didn't need the camera anymore.
It was basically all about cutting down and out the scenes that we didn't want, and then adding the captions in, and sorting out transitions. As our filming schedule was so spaced out, we obviously couldn't do all of our editing at once, and took us at least three weeks to edit it down properly.
Once the editing was all finished we began work on the music, and enhancing the sound. Because i had knowledge of garageband prior to the project, I guided us through the process with alot of input from Amy and Adam, my music knowledge, and our knowledge of horror trailers helped us to create the music for our piece. We used a very low C tone note, and occasionally added harmony parts in, as well as creating a chorussy/bassy drum effect for shocking moments in the trailer that cut to a blackout. I loved the way that you can actually put the trailer in the garageband interface to create the music at the same time as you watch the trailer, because it gives you the picture of what your trailer will actually be like. And you can shrink down or expand the note area to get precise placement of certain notes, so if your note was a couple of frames out on the motion picture, you could change it, to be perfectly in time with ease.
Once the editing and the sound was done, i had to create the logo for the film production company. I did this on photoshop. I got a basic picture of a cartoon rabbit, and coloured it to actually look like one, except putting the eyes red to connote evil (as our film was a horror film, I thought that was appropriate). We then had to find a decent font to say "REDRabbitProductions" Underneath, so we ventured to Dafont.com, where you can download fonts for free. Throughout AS media, I found this site to be very helpful, and it has continued to be throughout A2 as well.
Putting these fonts into Photoshop was easy, in fact, putting anything into photoshop is easy now. I love designing things, and I have had plenty of practise on photoshop over the last two years to have quite a vast knowledge of it. Occasionally i will ask the teacher what to do with some things, but you learn something new everyday.
Once I had finished the logo, I put it in the Final Cut Pro editing suite, added some transitions, and was finished editing. The next part was the ancillary texts.
To create these, i did some photo shoots on the film set so that we didn't have to go back afterwards and waste more time. We took about 20 decent shots on my Lumix digital camera, and uploaded them to the computer.
Again, I put these photos in photoshop, before emailing them to the others in the group so they could use them for their pieces, and began creating the film poster and magazine cover. I used basic outlines of the Total Film masthead, and i experimented with different layouts to see which one matched best. After spending about a week on both, I came up with about 4 designs and had to pick one of each to use. I now find photoshop even easier as i spent hours experimenting and creating with different photo effects, and text strokes etc.
Once finished , I uploaded everything to blogger and began to analyse and evaluate.
I have found all the new web 2.0 technology so useful, but it's just finding the time to get on a computer that is the hard part. I could quite happily pick up a pen and paper and do it all there and then, but I think this is better. It's easier, if you make mistakes, you can go over them, it's accessible to everyone, it's just handy. It also looks very professional, and it's starting off a new wave of technology. One day everything will be on computers, but this is just the beginning.
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