1. “How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?”

2. Research & Planning Stage  When I and the rest of the group were planning our trailer ‘The Hunter ’ we took pictures with the college cameras (Sony dslr camera) and our own phones in order to find potential filming locations for our trailer to be shot. We had to do a lot of research in this stage as we wanted to make a film trailer with a certain style i.e. an unconventional crime thriller film with postmodern conventions. With a female as our main protagonist. So at this point we had to research similar films such as; Kill Bill, Foxy Brown, and Columbiana in order to take influence and to use similar techniques which they used in order to advertise our film etc. We would use internet websites like Wikipedia in order to gather all information, it was important for us to do this because we didn’t have a good idea about the genre and how to go about making a trailer, so this was extremely useful and necessary. There was also information about the crime genre as a whole on the college VLE. Which everybody found so helpful! By doing all these things it made it so much easier for me and the rest of my group to plan our film trailer ‘The Hunter’ as we now have the basic knowledge required to do so.  Wikipedia was helpful as it helped us to understand what media postmodern theory was and how we were able to give our film a postmodern twist. It also helped inform us about similar films so we could take influence from them. The college VLE had a lot of information regarding theory which improved and helped our knowledge.

3. More Research & Planning…  At the beginning of the planning process we spent a large amount of time on Youtube because we had to see other film trailers which had a similar narrative we were going to use so we could take influence and see what works. By doing this we could also read the Youtube comments and see if the audience reacted well to this and if they picked out any bad points we were able to avoid this when making our film trailer ‘The Hunter’. We watched film trailers such as Sin City because we were interested with the postmodern twist of their movie with the black and white aspect and we were considering doing a similar thing with our film.  The communicated with our group and further developed our ideas by posting work and ideas up onto the blogs where the other members can offer feedback and advice. We all did this during the process as it helped us see what worked and what didn’t in order to better our film trailer. Each member of our group made PowerPoint slideshows which included all our theory and ideas of genre which helped us because we could all take the best ideas we had in order to further improve our film trailer. Websites such as incompetech and Dafont were used so we could find royalty free music and free fonts. These websites were great as they had a massive range of both music and fonts so we could see what worked and what didn’t work for our trailer.

4. Production Stage  Once we had a clear idea of what we were doing we moved onto the production stage. This was the stage that we began filming and editing our film trailer. We filmed our trailer using a Canon EOS 600D with the help of a lens baby if required. We had a tutorial of how to use this equipment in the planning stage so we already had knowledge on the equipment. This camera was effective and easy to use I and the rest of the group had no problems whilst using it. Once we captured all the footage and shots we needed for the trailer, we moved onto the editing stage where we used Adobe Photoshop. Myself and jack already knew the basics of Adobe whereas Munya was a real expert. Because of this our group excelled at editing and we didn’t need to ask too many questions. This shows how effective Adobe Premier was for our group as we knew how to use almost every aspect of it in order to improve our trailer ‘The Hunter’ to the best t that we could.

5. More Production…  During the production stage we had a variety of equipment that we were able to use. This included; Sound kit, Boom mic, sound horn and specialist sound effects. We continued to use Dafont and Incompetch in this stage because we needed to pic further fonts and sounds to be used (which were free) that may have been different in the planning stage. This was because after the filmng and editing begun our trailer adapted which required other fonts and sounds to suit it whereas the original choices were not suitable anymore. We chose a sharper font at this point to reflect our main characters personality. She is a fragile character however she is very edgy and hard hitting, which is why she is our protagonist. The sharper font was chosen because of how edgy she is and angry she still is about her parents death years ago. Which further hints at the narrative and the vendetta she has. In the editing stage Adobe Premier was not only helped us in editing our movie but it also improved our blogs because we were able to print screen certain images and then talk about this on the blog as proof and to help improve our overall marks. Adobe Photoshop was also used at this stage. We used Photoshop to create our two ancillary products; The poster and the magazine. These products were required to support our main product which was our trailer. They helped advertise our film further and our film promotion.

6. Evaluation Stage  In the evaluation stage we were required to answer a number of questions to explain the process we took in order and to show the examiner the knowledge we have about it. I chose to answer the questions mainly on PowerPoint and Word. This was because it gave me a bit of variety in my presentation and the examiner wouldn’t be bored of seeing the same word document over and over again. I also posted pictures, captions and work straight onto the blog, to further boost both my evaluation answers and my blog. Furthermore I and the rest of my group made a directors commentary in order to explain the process verbally and to help us answer question one of evaluation. These technologies improved my blog dramatically because it enabled me to answer each question at a good standard and helped allow my blog to stand out which was crucial for me. We posted our trailer up onto YouTube because we are aware that millions of people around the world use it which means it’s a perfect and cheap way of showing your trailer to a massive number of people. We found that YouTube was highly effective because of this and it made sense to advertise and show are film through this form of media. We posted our video up onto Facebook to allow even more people to see it. This was effective in us reaching more members of our target group and in allowing the word of mouth of our film to travel further, these were the main advantages.