Evaluation Question 4 - Danielle

Evaluation Question 4

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

 

Photoshop:

Typography & Tagline

• Along with the poster production, we also had to produce our own typography.  We used Dafont to search for a good font to form the foundation of ours typography that we wished to manipulate. After narrowing down to three fonts, we chose to go for a font called Dark Ages as it was simplistic enough for us to manipulate without making it look unprofessional. 
• For this we also used Photoshop to  manipulate our typography  in fitting with our title and other media products. We started out by using the smudging tool on Photoshop to manipulate the ends of our title as our typography manipulating skills were extremely undeveloped. Once we had chosen a tutorial to carry out  we applied the skills that we learned to the creation of our typography. After realising that using the smudge tool was not sufficient we decided to use tools such as tiling and shading as well as using the stylising option on Photoshop many times in order to achieve the fragmented look of our final typography. However, lacking the skills for Photoshop at first was not our only issue.
• After creating our final typography we had to transfer it onto a transparent background so we could use it on all of our media products, our website, poster and teaser trailer. Yet even when importing a copy of our typography onto our website, the transparent background turned grey, therefore making our typography look rather unprofessional and definitely ill fitted with the rest of our package.
• Additionally, we were able to reverse the letter of our title too allowing us to get across the psychological element of our trailer. To do this we used Photoshop's "transform" tool to manipulate singular letters.
• In terms of our tag line, we decided to use the font called "OldStyle" as we thought it was basic enough to manipulate and it also fit in well with the rest of our chosen typography. I started off by opening up a new file in Photoshop and making sure that my canvas was transparent therefore allowing it to be transferred onto our poster without any fuss. When typing our tagline into Photoshop, we decided to separate "herself" from the majority of the tagline so it would give us the option to move it around our poster.

  

  In order to manipulate our typography we applied a "wind" effect to our tagline. To do this we went to filter - stylize- wind and then selected wind from the menu going from the right. This made the typography look extremely worn out. This fits in well with our poster and our title as the mise en scene looks worn out as does our typography for our title. 
• This is the finished typography. In terms of manipulation it doesn't show how it has been manipulated explicitly. Overall, this is not as effective as it looked in Photoshop, however it fits in extremely well with our poster. 

   

Poster

• We also used Photoshop to produce typography for our trailer as well as contributing towards the production our poster. We started out by selecting the images that we wanted for our poster image; luckily we decided to carry out photo-shoots during every filming day in case we missed the opportunity. When filming our loft scene we noticed that we should carry out an extensive photo-shoot as the lighting, in combination with the mise en scene was provided great shadows against the wall.
• Once we had selected our image, we started to edit it by adjusting the saturation and contrast levels the image to suit the rest of our package, as the use of psychedelic colours is a running theme through out our website, poster and teaser trailer.
• We needed to make sure that our poster conformed to the narrative and genre therefore we took two images one with the imaginary friend (antagonist) and the protagonist - we then started off by using the lasso tool to cut away any remains of the image that were not needed, and then used the rubber tool to remove the hard to get to areas. We then cut the image of the protagonist tied to a chair and applied it to the image of the antagonist standing directly behind her to create the sinister poster image that is evident on our final poster.
• However, we did run into a problem after finalising our final poster image. Psychological horror film poster are conventionally portrait, although our image was portrait we realised that it didn't fit the exact measurements of an A4 sheet of paper which meant that the poster would be distorted if it were to be printed out. However, we were able to overcome this issue by using the image size editor and scaling to size out tagline and title.

Pixlr Editor

Website

• We used editing software such as Photoshop, Pixlr Editor and Wix to help us edit and produce a website for our trailer. One problem that we encountered was uploading our typography, titles and tagline onto the website without them distorting somehow.
• For our website image, we used Photoshop's lasso tool to cut out one image of the protagonist and then used the rubber tool to get rid of any of the remaining image. Once we had achieved the image with the two images of the protagonist and her imaginary friend, we used Pixlr Express.
• Pixlr Express allowed us to edit our image quickly and extremely efficiently. It also provided us with other options that Photoshop failed to give us, such as the focal tool.
• We used the focal tool to bring focus solely to the protagonist rather than her imaginary friend allowing our audience to notice her first as she is our primary subject.
• The focal tool also made the imaginary friend the secondary subject in on our website. This meant that the imaginary friend was the second object that our audience was drawn to.
• Finally, we adjusted the hue, saturation and contrast of our image to again make sure that the colour scheme was in fitting with the psychedelic colour scheme that we chose to abide by.
• Using Photoshop we made sure that each image was set to a transparent background yet once imported onto the Wix website, a grey colour covered it distorting the text and making it hard to read. It also made it look extremely unprofessional, however, we were able to overcome this by simply re-applying a transparent background onto the typography and re-inserting it onto the website.

Logic Pro

• We also used sound editing software such as logic pro to our advantage to manipulate our sound that we had recorded by looping and layering our sounds to create a much thicker texture in sound and build up the suspense and anticipation that we wanted.
• An explicit example of  looping and layering sounds is used within our green screen scenes, when the antagonists name is repeated for a while.
• We recorded the sound as three individual tracks making sure that we used a quiet area with a good acoustic so it make the editing process a lot easier.
• 
  Once we had recorded I left the  audio clips at the length that they are at would prove to be too short to just insert into our trailer. To overcome this issue, I right clicked on a selected track and chose "loop" from the drop down menu and this looped each track. However, it became extremely predictable to listen to.
  
• In order to overcome this problem, I had to select a specific amount of regions that I wanted, in this case I wanted three and then I spread them out along the other tracks at random to add to the tension and build suspense.
• After this I trimmed the edges down and made sure that the track was even as possible towards the end. To do this, I faded it out towards the end and then bounced the file and converted it into an mp3 file. Therefore, I could sync it with iTunes and then drag it directly onto our footage.

 

                                                                    

 

iMovie

• Throughout the process of producing our trailer we used iMovie and Final Cut Pro as our editing software. The main feature within our 60 second teaser trailer was the use of our green screen, which enabled us to stretch our editing skills.
•  We carried out thorough research into how to edit our green screen footage as this was our first time using a green screen. We utilised all the editing software that was available to us from iMovie through to Adobe Premiere Pro  which allowed us to edit and manipulate our green screen footage in more accurate and specific way than iMovie offered.
• To broaden our editing skills we developed our skills using  Photoshop  to help with our photo manipulation for our poster as well as our video editing skills for our website as it has includes an ongoing gif of the protagonist.
• Additionally, we had to incorporate the recording symbol within our footage to convey the protagonist’s mental illness spiralling out of control.
• A problem that we encountered when searching for a webcam overlay was that none of them had a transparent background. To overcome this dilemma we saved the image and opened it in Photoshop with a transparent background and used the eraser tool to erase the black background that was part of the original webcam overlay. This proved to be time consuming but it was a good alternative to using a webcam overlay that did not have a transparent background at all.
• However, once we did this, we found a downloadable version of a webcam overlay that could be downloaded and applied to footage straight away. We simply imported the overlay into iMovie, making sure that advanced tools were switched on and then dragged it on top of our footage and selected "picture in picture" from the menu and finally adjusted the size of it around the frame of our footage.
• We had to make sure that the webcam overlay remained the same size throughout all the footage that we applied it to as it was clear when the size of it dropped.