Evaluation Question 4 - Ella

How did you use your media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Filming

When filming we decided we wanted to use a montage within our trailer and so planned what different shot we wanted to use. We decided we wanted unusual and different shots to make it look interesting. Some of our best shot were of inside a car and a stamp shot.

The Inside Car Shot

For the inside the car shot I sat in the back of a car and filmed two people in the front driving and seeing someone and chasing them down the road. This point of view shot worked really well as an unusual angle for our montage. We also used shot of our protagonist punching into the camera, which looked really effective as well. 

The Stamp Shot

My favourite montage shot we did was the stamp shot. The stamp shot is a low angle shot of the protagonist stomping on the lens. In order to create this we placed the camera on the floor and had the protagonist pretend to stamp on it. This shot added a bit of creativity to our montage in terms of camera shots. We wanted to add some interesting shots to our trailer to keep i interesting and I think this shots does this very well. We also used  this as our transition shot from the calm music to the more upbeat and urban music in our trailer. I think this adds a good sense of urgency as it is though he is stamping on someone’s face it also links in with our theme of violence. 

Editing

We did a lot of research and planning for our coursework whether it was deconstructing trailers to identify our genre and choosing our path for our film or looking at posters for common link and ideas. 

In the editing stage we teamed this shot with the sound of a gun shot which added a sense of urgency to the shot. 


The Punch Shot

The punch shot is a mid shot in which our protagonist punches into the screen as if he is attacking the the lense. This then looks like a point of view shot as if the person watching is the victim. We teamed this shot with a Final Cut Pro gun shot sound effect in the editing stage. This adds a sense of urgency to the shot and also made some of our peers jump which was the effect that we wanted.

When editing our trailer we decided that our titles should move to the beat of the music. This links everything together and makes the music link more within the trailer as the titles pulse as thought the beat of the music is physically moving them. 

Photoshop

We also used Photoshop to edit our images and the many versions of out typography for our title. After the evaluation of the trailer using comments from YouTube, it was mentioned how we could make our typography more creative to grab the audience and create a much more gritty sense to our trailer. We used photoshop to manipulate our final title by adding black muddy puddle marks on to it. By using a paintbrush tool on Photoshop at different opacities we created this title.  I think the mirrored gunshot splatters and blood against the typography give it its individual and unique typography. We needed to make sure that this typography did not over power the poster and make it look crowded.

 We also used Photoshop on our poster. We used two images on our poster and so need to merge them together as one so used Photoshop to do this.  We also used Photoshop to darken our photo to make it seem dirtier and scarier as a location.

After a thorough researching process for the poster, the inspiration was mainly from the poster from the film Shank. We went to our filming location and took several pictures of Shay - our main protagonist - standing in front of the flats. We then found the image above and decided to merge them together using the blur and merge function. The final out come is shown below within the poster.

Wix

We used wix to make our website. We deconstructed the websites of the A2 coursework last year. We felt that this would be better as it would be possible for us to able to recreate anything we liked or thought would look effective.

We liked this website the most out all the ones we looked at and deconstructed. The images used were very high quality with amazing editing when switching between the characters close ups, this is because all the pictures are evidently taken using a professional high quality camera and have the use of a sepia type affect. All the images are different with each of the different members of the cast telling a different story. The teaser trailer is embedded and starts automatically and the title of the film is professional and is a good font which suits the genre of the film, something that we want to create, the typography also aids the moving images as you can see the images moving behind the text.

We started with a plan of what we wanted our website to look like. We made this plan before taking any of the photos and so it is very different to what our website actually looks like. this is because when taking the photos we found this layout would not be effective enough.

This is the first draft of our website. It is very simple with the time-lapse of our location in the background and simple typography. When showing this to our peers for feed back they said that we needed to make the websites more attractive and intriguing as the way it was at this point did not make them want to see the film.

From this feedback we made a lot of changes. We added our protagonist, new manipulated typography, ratings with stars, a billing blog, our tagline and our trailer that automatically starts when you open the website. We felt this made the poster a lot more interesting and appealing for our audience.









Sound

In our trailer music was something we felt should be perfect as it is often the music that draws you in. I did many music deconstructions in which I focused on lyrics, beats that stand our, lines from the characters and shot that were shown with titles/lyrics. For our trailer we decided to use two songs. One for the opening and one for the main part of it. We researched many different option and ended our search with the who that we found the best fit 'Adrenaline' and a piano hip hop instrumental.

Not only did we use music in our trailer we also had our voiceover of our protagonist saying our tagline, which we recorded on logic and added in on final cut pro to the beginning of our trailer. I think this was good as our tagline then also turns into a sort of mantra or motto that our protagonist might use.  

For our trailer we decided to add in as a voiceover. We found a study that said people remember things better when they hear them rather than reading them on a screen. 

Using this information we did research in to voiceovers of films that weren't urban drama as we found that they aren't very common in urban drama trailers. We decided using the voiceover would be a really good idea as not only would people remember it better but it also linked in with stereotypes of other urban drama trailers like ‘Kidulthood’ and  ‘Green Street Hooligans’.