Question 4:

Q4: How did you use media (digital) technologies in the construction (pre/post production), research, planning and evaluating stage?

During the research, planning, pre and post production of my short horror film, poster and radio trailer I used several forms of digital technology to aid me to create a successful final product.

During the research stage of my product digital technologies played a big role as through web 2.0 I was able to conduct analysis of other products. I was able to conduct research into other production companies which produces had successful horror films; I had researched Dark Castle Entertainment as they had produced the film Orphan (2009) which shares similar characteristics to Indelible such as having a young female lead actress. Through web 2.0 I also conducted research on short horror films, radio trailers and film posters, I had identified the codes and conventions they had conformed to and challenged, to gain inspiration for my product. I had also used presentation tools such as Prezi which allowed me to present my research in a slideshow format.

 In addition to this I had used SurveyMonkey and Instagram to ask my target audience questions in order to gain an insight of what my target audience are into. My group and I had split up the surveys so we had gained feedback on narrative, poster, what they like in a horror film and radio trailer. From this we had gained qualitative and quantitative data.

 I had sent the survey to family and friends of our target audience via various different social media platforms such as Whatsapp and Snapchat, which are also other examples of digital technologies. My group and I had chosen to use Instagram as it is a popular form of social media amongst our target audience, it was also a means for us to access our audience.

 I had also used WhatsApp to create a group chat with my group in order to communicate effectively and share useful information regarding our products. Through WhatsApp we had conducted group meetings to discuss about our products.

Moreover, during research my group and I had created a preliminary task. We had selected a scene from the film The Conjuring (2013), we had decided to film using the Canon 100d camera, however whilst filming the battery had died, so we resulted in using our phones to record. We had then edited this using Final Cut and uploaded it up onto our blogs using YouTube. This was useful as we edited our final product using Final Cut, we were able to familiarise with the tools and effects, I was then confident when editing my designated scenes of Indelible.

During the planning stage of my product my group and I had created an animated storyboard which was extremely useful for us as it gave us an idea of how our film would be and also we were able to make changes. We then edited the storyboard using iMovie and also uploaded it onto YouTube to share on our blogs. We had also used social media and email to do an audition callout in order to find actors for our film.

During the post- production of our horror film, we used various examples of digital technology. Firstly, we used Final Cut to edit the film, we used tools such as blade and cut and select and place scenes where we wanted. After we had our offline edit we then started playing around with filters and transitions, for example in the last scene we had slowed down the pace of the doll falling, this therefore slowed down the narrative for our audience. In addition to this we had used filters on our flashbacks to show the audience the difference in time, this allowed them to identify the anachronic narrative we had followed. We had used ADR (automated dialog replacement) to re- record dialogue as during filming the mic didn’t not pick up the dialogue efficiently or was it of high quality. After we had recorded the new dialogue, we them imported it on to final cut.

In order to edit our poster we had used Photoshop CS6. We had used a range of tools to edit the image. For example, we enhanced the colour of the red ropes attached to doll to make it more apparent to the audience. In addition to this we had also used Photoshop to add the title, tagline and credits to the poster. In order to do this we had downloaded the font from 1001 fonts.com and dafont.com. We then used Photoshop to edit the teaser posters, for the first teaser poster we had increased the sharpness of the image and also the brightness in order to enhance the detail. For the second teaser poster we had used a filter to make the image look disturbing and edgy.

Lastly, digital technology played a vital role in packaging my evaluations. Through digital technology I was able to access and use a range of softwares, such as Powtoon and Prezi, in order to package my evaluations. I used web 2.0 to get pictures of logos when referring to them in my question. I then used my phone to record my voiceover for the questions, I then emailed these to myself and uploaded onto my software ready for me to package.