Q4) How Did You Use Media Technologies In The Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

Media technologies were an integral factor regarding the completion of all three products of 'The Return' along with the listed phases of A2 coursework in a concise, time efficient and professional manner. The most prominently utilised technology was Web 2.0 (Internet), Serif Movie Plus, Adobe Photoshop CS6, Microsoft Office products and SlideShare. Inevitably the correct utilisation of Blogger.com was essential too, with the showcasing of the marketing project being carried out and published there.

As described in the project brief, as part of the Research phase an established and formidable amount of knowledge of the Slasher genre was required prior to engaging in the planning or construction. Google.com, Bing.com, Wikipedia & IMDB aided me in acquiring the foundation of information on the codes and conventions of Slasher. It also allowed me to delve into the history and influence of the genre, understanding how Film Noir and German Expressionism are different and how they influenced the genre with their entailed unique aspects e.g. usage of set pieces and mise en scene to express subjective character emotion and how they still influence and impact Slasher titles released today. The internet and its entailed sources allowed me to also discover the formulaic and conventional factors that make up a Slasher poster, trailer and a magazine cover; for example I discovered, via YouTube.com, that Slasher trailers such as Dead Man's Shoes tend to start off slow paced with no indication of genre at all which develops into a grim fast paced montage combined with very swift jump cuts and edits.

 In the process of creating my own production/distribution company logo I referenced and took inspirations from many existing Production company logos such as TriStar's Unicorn which influenced my idea to have a Grizzly Bear as the company mascot; this would not have been possible without Google vast library of images available from their search engine.

When creating an Audience Survey to comprehend my demographics 'wants and needs' and how exactly I can cater to them I utilised QuestionPro.com to create a detailed and comprehensive platform in which to gain vital data and which enabled me to distribute the survey appropriately amongst varying social media to expand parameters of respondents via 'copy and pasting' of the URL or Hyperlink; This Quantitative demographic data was vital because if not for QuestionPro.com and if I had not obtained this Quantitative information, my media product would not have been responding or catering to the correct audience or target market and bearing in mind the audience is 'niche', that could have been detrimental to the success of 'The Return'. I was able to effectively track respondents on their completion rate, questions avoided and most popular answers to gain a demographic consensus on these questions just as result of this useful statistics feature, social media such as Facebook and twitter allowed me to reach out to a broader demographic with their large user bases to gain the most amount of respondents within my target market as possible. I then utilised Microsoft Excel to use the quantitative data to produce a graph with varying formats of tables, graphs and charts which were all customisable e.g. 3D graphs or 2d display etc. PowerPoint then allowed me to present this data in an elegant, organised fashion which allowed me to provide commentary on these findings and how it will effect the following stages of the marketing project.

 Moving on to the planning phase, Microsoft Word was utilised very well regarding the software usage in this stage as majority of the tasks encountered such as Risk Assessments, Call Sheets and Shooting Scripts required a table but not to the complex and intricate extent that Microsoft Excel offers, hence why Microsoft Word was a perfect media technology to be used for this stage with simple and easy to read tables with customisation being simplistic and easy with no prior experience needed to produce these, unlike Photoshop CS6. Word allowed tables to be resized, new columns could be added and text could be made bold. I also produced the synopsis on this document with my group as errors and corrections could be easily modified without complication as opposed to writing the document down on paper, Word simplified this process as the Synopsis was particularly lengthy; providing word counts, spell checks and structure alignment.

However, the two products of magazine cover and poster, when it came to the Construction phase to build the ancillary products required a more intricate, complex and multilayered media software technology system. This system was Photoshop CS6, initially I chose CorelDraw12 and Microsoft Publisher to create the poster and magazine cover however I discovered that these types of software suffered from format inconsistencies and lack of tools to utilise. Photoshop CS6 however provided me with many intricate tools such as the magnetic rubber or lasso which identifies the image's border and automatically crops and erases the unnecessary background image, it also enables the user to apply a negative, bleached, black & white and wide selection of various other filters to be applied to images such as my Fangoria side article images; in which I edited the model's face to have multiple negative filters with red glowing eyes to make reference to the genre and the eerie & gore based images located on the side of Fangoria.  Photoshop also provides the basic tools which are to be expected such as the crop, move and resize tools which were all efficient in their own way. Photoshop has the ability to add many layers upon a image to exaggerate an effect such as the throat slit image in which I added 6 layers of colour defining filters which made the blade more visible and prominent.

 

 

In the construction of the typography for 'The Return' the internet came to efficient use yet again, this time in the form of 1001FreeFonts.com, I utilised this website to select an appropriate font which conveyed the horror genre appropriately, I discovered a font reminiscent of 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' typography and edited it further in Photoshop to add blood and a more general grim effect to the font making it my own.

Serif Movie Plus provided me and my group with an effective media technology which was capable of providing the means to edit our trailer footage. In this software the footage could be attached to multiple timelines, duplicated, divided into frames for ultra precise cuts and 'camera wipes' or fades such as the scene in which Ruby is swinging in the park and the shots which are seamlessly stitched together via 'Sutre' as a result of using Serif Movie Plus. However the uploading process was something in which we had to work around with, as this took a substantial amount of time in which the media supervisor assisted  us with by uploading the footage onto the tapes then onto hard drives ready for editing. In addition the software's lighting edits were not enough to improve the quality of some footage shot within principal photography in Winter, which therefore forced me and my group to reshoot the footage in better lighting conditions due to the Serif's limitations but also Winter's darker daylight hours. A software called 'Cubase' allowed us to add more pitch, tempo and definition to diegetic and non-diegetic sounds heard within 'The Return' with the utilisation of a sound engineer we were able to emulate realistic sound effects such as the snapping of raw noodles to replicate the neck bone snap of Jay when Ruby kills him. This software also refined sounds which were difficult to hear in principal photography  such as dialogue which 'Cubase' allowed us to create via voiceovers to fix this issue, this saved us reshooting even more footage which was difficult realistically with the independent studio budget provided.

The most fundamental aspect of media technologies utilised in the process of principal photography however was the portability, miniaturisation of technology in general. The camera and  its compact sizes yet excellent picture quality allowed my group to traverse difficult terrain (thick mud, heavily overgrown branches which covered areas and steep hills)  and yet still have the ability to take the camera with us due to the balanced weight, size and performance of the Sony camera. Had the camera been any bigger or heavier, my group and I would've been restricted to the areas to film within, a prominent issue not too long ago (1900s) before the digital age and influx of miniaturisation; where a standard camera was ludicrously expansive and needed an equal amount of manpower to transport the hardware around. High quality megapixel phones and high capacity 'USBs' are all examples of the miniaturised technology used to produce 'The Return' with these compact devices acting as substitute data carriers of footage and photos if data could not be accessed elsewhere.

In addition, Social media provided my group with an excellent means of reaching out to specific niches of demographics (in our case; Slasher niche demographic) by distributing surveys there to gain qualitative and quantitative feedback, but also discuss and evaluate ideas within the production group that created 'The Return'. The very nature of the marketing project with its independent studio budget restrictions required the utilisation of social media to promote and advertise The Return; as I uploaded the URL on face book to gain more attention and boost the 'word of mouth' effect to increase profit of 'The Return'.

In the evaluation phase I utilised SlideShare, a site that allows you to upload PowerPoint presentations and view them via embedding the URL into a blog such as Blogger.com to neatly and concisely view the research and various other documents I created prior and post production.

In conclusion I believe that without the media technologies listed above, 'The Return' simply could not be created in principal photography, edited in the construction phase and finalised in the post production phases. Each website used, software downloaded and worked with and hardware carried around were all essentially involved in producing 'The Return'.