Evaluation part 3

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

I used new media for research and planning for my film trailer “Ring Rosie”. I searched many trailers on to YouTube like The Walking Dead, World War Z, and Dawn of the Dead (2004) all of these showed different types of zombies such as slow, mutant or runner ones. All of this gave me insight of what to use for my final piece of work.

 I also used imdb.com to help me show what the most popular rated zombie movies are out there which is The Walking Dead with a 8.7, while the least rated zombie movie is Pontypool with only a 6.7. However, we felt even with a score in the 6’s the zombie sub-genre of horror has a lot of mass appeal.

General horrors DVDs also influenced my trailer of watching many films and techniques which I could include like Clover field with the use of the “handheld” camera as well as Birdman with the continuous longer shots to give a feeling of immediacy.

Other technology I used was Wikipedia to show the origin where zombies came from and the research showed zombies featured widely in Haitian rural folklore, as dead persons physically revived by the act of necromancy of a bokor sorcerer (the bokor is a witch-like figure.) Zombies remain under the control of the bokor as their personal slaves, since they have no will of their own. There also exists within the Haitian tradition called the "zombie astral", which is a part of the human soul that is captured by a bokor and used to enhance the bokor's spiritual power.  This showed me the life behind of a zombie however I made it more modern by following the path of “the dead will walk the earth” or – as they say in Dawn of the Dead (1979) “when there’s no more room in hell the dead will walk the earth.”

I used media for my construction of my trailer by the use of Premier Pro. In making my trailer one technique I used was the amount of brightness and contrast I used in my shots. The shots we used were to too bright due to the winter sun being in a horror trailer. Therefore, we put the brightness down as well as slightly increasing the contrast to make it look darker and more sinister. We did this to all of the shots. Another technique I used was razor cutting the shots in half and put a zombie sequence in the middle to create a different effect. As well as this I also used copyright-free music – which was a version of “Ring of Rosies” we found online, and then added intertitles so as they show up on the screen the music fit perfectly with it and looks very neat. I also used adobe after effects to create the animated inter-titles and that the filter/animation I used on there was called “dissolve,” which creates a ghostly effect

For my magazine and movie poster I used Adobe Photoshop to make the idea of Ring Rosie come to life. One technique I used was a selective colouring effect on the main character in my poster as well as this added the saturation up to make the subject much brighter to add emphasis. In my magazine I increased the contrast to make everything seem more edgy and darker to prove it was a horror magazine. The fonts I used were from the website DaFont and the font which I used in my poster is called “Heaven Gate” and the font in my magazine is called “Zombie.”

Lastly, I used media technologies to evaluate my product with the use of my blogs also anyone can see as well putting up on YouTube to make sure it is easy to access. The focus group screening from my whole class gave me a rough cut of what to improve in my shots and what I should do for my final piece. My friends also shared the trailer on their Facebook accounts and a few comments saying “it was good” and so on. Hopefully my final piece won’t be too bad with the second final screening and I will get a high mark overall.