Evaluation Task 2 - Evaluation of Hardware and Software

Written by Tom Bailey and Emma Taylor

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? What particular camerawork techniques & editing tools were used and to what effect? 

                     

We conducted much of our research on websites such as IMDb and Vimeo, as they both allowed us to watch the trailers of films with similar conventions to ours such as ‘How I Live Now’, ‘Abduction’ and ‘I am Number Four’ and then analyse them so we could understand the genre specific conventions and adhere to them when making our trailer. Vimeo also allowed us to take screen shots of relevant features that we could then convert into JPGs to display on our blogs.

We utilised the software Open mind 2 to create a mind map of our initial ideas surrounding a coming of age genre and other sub genres such as thrillers, action films and Sci-Fi’s.

 Imdb actually had a huge impact on our decision making and what we would ultimately include in our hybrid genre of a coming of age and a thriller. For example it was only after watching the trailer for ‘How I live now’ that we decided to include an explosion as we felt this had a huge impact on the effectiveness of the whole trailer. We also drew influence from the editing style, of example, the end of the ‘How I live now trailer’ Includes a reversed montage edit of all the clips included in the trailer, we really liked the effect this added to the trailer as it essentially sums up everything the viewers has just seen in the trailer into a few short seconds, we wanted to replicate it in our own to bring the trailer to a close. We also included chiaroscuro lighting similar to that seen in the trailer for ‘I am Number Four’. The chiaroscuro lighting connotes the dark sides to the story. In 'I am Number Four', the chiaroscuro was most prominent at the point of disruption, in this case it is when he discovers he isn’t who he thought he was and his life is torn apart. We also used chiaroscuro lighting at the point of disruption in our trailer for 'Fallen Grace', in both the explosion scene and in the scene where Zara is going off the rails.

                     

 We took a lot of our inspiration on costume design from figures in popular culture and also characters from other films and TV shows, Charlie for example was based loosely on the character of the same from ‘The perks of being a wallflower, IMDb and YouTube gave us a constant reference to the character, allowing us to mould our own characters according to dress codes etc..  

Our research expanded several mediums; one of which was the software Prezi. This is online software that can be used to create presentations, this was a really fun and creative way of displaying our research that could then be easily referenced back to when planning our own trailer,

Photoshop cs5, although we didn’t need excessive use of Photoshop it was extremely useful when creating our poster. Photoshop allowed us to change the gradient so it goes from black to white from bottom to top. This way we can have a light colour at the top and still have back at the bottom allowing the important institutional information to be seen with a smooth transition from light to dark.

                                       

Using Photoshop CS5 also allowed us to import images onto transparent layers meaning we can have our photo of our main character Grace in the background with other layers of text on top such as the title, the age certificate and institutional information. We were also allowed to add further layers to alter the colour (selective colour layer) and another layer for contrast (brightness and contrast layer. This meant the colours could be altered within the poster to add more of a thriller atmosphere similar to that in posters we analyzed like the poster for ‘Shutter Island’ which features heavy chiaroscuro lighting and the main protagonist’s face half in shadow, we tried to achieve a similar affect with our poster with focus being placed on the Grace’s face, this was all possible due to Photoshop. The colours we used were also to connote an idea of death and destruction. We were also able to include conventions such as primary opposition into the poster with the monochrome effect using black and white to represent good and evil, reflecting what will be seen in the film itself.