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

Technology has a huge impact on the production of media products such as the ones I have made. The two most important pieces of equipment I used were the video camera and my SLR camera. We used the video camera to film our trailer as my SLR does not have the function of video recording. The camera can be zoomed which meant we could get a variety of shots and angles.

When we started producing our media products we had to some research, to do this I used the internet. For doing research for the film trailer I used the internet watch and analyse real trailers. I used YouTube to do this as YouTube is one of the most popular websites for watching videos. YouTube is a good website to use as it has a trailer for nearly all the films made in recent years. Watching the trailers gave me ideas of what the forms and conventions of film trailers are, this was useful to me as it helped me to produce my own trailer. After I finished the production and editing of my trailer I uploaded it to YouTube so that I could easily post it onto my blog.

Once all the filming was done, the editing could begin. I used my own laptop to do this which has a copy of Adobe Premiere Pro, I found the editing quite difficult as I had never used Premiere Pro before and therefore did not understand how everything worked. However once I had worked out how to use Premiere Pro properly I started to edit my trailer. I imported the clips we wanted to use and cut them down into the project timeline, I then arranged the clips in the order we had planned.

The other piece of equipment I used to produce my media products was my Canon 1000D SLR camera, this was an important piece of equipment as I used it to take the photographs for the front cover of my magazine and the film poster. I am a photography student therefore I know about the lighting needed and I also know how to use my camera properly.

When researching magazine covers and film posters, I used Google Images. I typed in what I was looking for into the search engine, I then looked through the pages slowly gaining ideas for my own products. Once I had done some research, I typed up my thoughts on the covers and posters I had found and posted it onto my blog. This helped me in the production process as it gave me ideas of what audiences are likely to be attracted to and therefore helped me decide what I should put on my magazine cover and poster.

To produce the cover and film poster I used Adobe Photoshop, this was not very difficult for me as I have been using Adobe Photoshop for many years. The first thing I did was choose the photographs I wanted to use for each product; I then edited the colour and lighting of them so that they fit in with the forms and conventions of the genre of horror. After having edited my photographs I started to put together my poster and magazine cover. To create my film poster I used a black background, red writing, the main photograph and credits at the bottom of the page. I used a different layer for each part of my poster; I put everything on separate layers so that I was able to move things around until everything was in the right place which is when I flattened the image and uploaded it onto my blog.

The production of my magazine cover was very similar to producing my film poster. I created the background by using the paint brush tool. I chose the colour black and changed the opacity, this made it easy for me to create a gradient effect. I then typed the puff and the masthead, before placing the main image on a separate layer over the masthead. I then typed up the rest of the writing and moved it all around until it was all in the right position. Once everything was right I flattened and saved the image so that it could be uploaded to my blog.