How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Research
- Creating a blog on blogger allowed us to research different aspects for our product, and gave each member of the group easy access to the research we had found.
- We used YouTube for tutorials for how to do make up effects and also for iMovie to help with our editing skills. YouTube make up tutorials gave us the best ideas of how we wanted our protagonist to look, even if it was just dark eyes, we wanted to do it as well as possible.
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- Youtube also allowed us to view film trailers and favourite them so we could watch them later.
The internet allowed us to visit film websites and blogs allowing us to deconstruct trailers, websites and posters and research our genre's conventions. We took ideas from trailers and full films such as Chatroom and Gamer.
- We used the Internet to communicate as a group over Facebook, and also created a group for the film that people could follow for updates.
- We used some existing questionnaire results to find out what people thought of existing films such as 'Chatroom' or 'Gamer' and how they thought these films could be better. This assisted us in creating our new trailer and made it appealing to a broader audience
We also researched sound.
We began by finding uncopyrighted music on youtube, which we used for our final music. we also found minor non diegetic sounds such as the sound of an explosion etc for particular moments of our trailer.
We also research on music search engines such as "Soundcloud" and rearch uncopyrighed DJ's and singer/song writers as inspiration and to use, such as "Baltazar's" page.
We found this very useful in our research as it enabled us to experiment with music and look on s music orientate social networking sites. This helped us find inspiration and uncopyrightes sounds to use for different individuals creations.
Planning
As we wanted a fast paced and jumpy trailer, this entailed filming lots of different scenes and footage. This required a lot of planning and organisation from the group. We devised a shooting script with dates for filming and what scenes we planned to film on those dates. We added more dates later so that we could complete all our filming. We also wrote down any notes and camera shots that we wanted to try and film.
We also sketched out an initial storyboard for our trailer, however this became redundant when we realised that our best shots came from experimenting and that we would be unable to plan an order for our footage without first looking at how it fitted with the music and other game footage.
As an early step, we also found all our game footage, so that it could influence our filming so that we knew that we had the right shots filmed. This helped us when editing later on, as it meant we could be more efficient.
To ensure that we made the most of our filming time, we also discussed exact locations beforehand so we knew where we going and what we were going to do. We then took photos of these locations to document the construction of our trailer.
Construction
When creating our teaser trailer, we used a standard video camera which could then be connected to the Apple iMacs, in order to edit footage. We used a variety of camera shots and techniques to create tension and intrigue to convey the genre of our film in our trailer.
For example, we kept the camera at the same level as the teenage boy when he is playing the game which displays the start of his decent into gaming insanity.
We then counteracted this by using a high angle shot of him putting the knives into his bag, as if to show that the audience that he knows what is happening to him but he doesn’t. It shows his vulnerability in video games. We also experimented with Point of View shots, which would aim to create the feeling that the audience can see that games he was being indulged in, to include them in what is happening to his mind.
Using iMovie on the Macs enabled us to not only arrange the footage in such a way that would create the teaser trailer format, but also allowed us to change the exposure, colour and contrast of our clips, adding variety and keeping the pace of the trailer fast.
Photoshop
The programme we used to edit our poster was "Gimp 2" . This enabled us to Pixelate the image as well as clean up blemished by using the air brush tool and change the shade of the photograph. This allowed us to make the poster appear professional.Wix
Wix is the website that we used to design our own homepage for our film's website. This allowed us to create a homepage with the option to design it however we wanted. The customisation meant that we could have our text on the homepage in the same colour as our poster and in our teaser trailer. We could also upload pictures so we could have our title in our chosen font, and use our poster image for the home page. We also added navigational tabs with different pages on to allow easy access to our website. The design is recognisable as "Gameboy" because of the font and colour scheme. The picture is also used through both the poster and the website, to ensure continuity and allows the audience to connect the two products in their mind under the "Gameboy" label.
The Wix website was really helpful and easy to navigate when designing our website. It also allowed the whole group to be able to access the web design in one easy place.
Evaluation
Intertextuality is very important in our film. We drew references between our font on our trailer as well as on all our ancillary tasks to games such as call of duty and space invaders.
The idea was that a person would see the font and not only recognise it as our film but also draw similarities to games they may have played in the past or present. We hoped that iconic imagery would allow us to attract different audiences that may not have even considered coming to see our film.
We felt we were also limited by our equipment and low budget and felt that our trailer would have benefitted from using some more modern techniques such as 3-D editing and animation. If we were able to make our film 3D we feel we would be able to attract a larger audience because of the original film idea and also the fact it was in 3D.
