Wordpress.com – my blog:

My blog was the place where all my written work was. We could use it to show all our research, planning and development as well as presenting our finished work and conducting feedback too.

The blog was essentially the hub for anything linked in anyway to my work:

-To keep our work organized we could create categories to which select posts were assigned so a particular post was easier to find at short notice

- Likewise we could make any links to other web pages easier to access by creating a link column were any links in the posts were; instead of having to search through all posts you could find it there

-It was a lot more helpful presenting all our research and planning on the blog rather than in a document because you could see more than one post at a time and any links you made were right there on hand – it felt a lot more creative and a lot easier to have everything in one place rather than in different documents and different folders.

- The blog was also good for keeping all my work of different medias together, such as my trailer and any explanation – I was able to embed videos which I wouldn’t be able to on a document – this was also helpful when it came to my research because I could embed other trailers I was analyzing and have the analysis right next to it.

- Another useful feature of using the blog was when I came to do audience feedback it allowed me to create polls – I could create the polls about certain posts and because the posts were all in the same place it was easy for others to access.

- It also allows you to embed power points either straight on to it or through slideshare.net which has been helpful for my evaluation.

The internet:My blog (described above) is just one aspects of the internet I used in the research, planning and creation of my trailer:

- As part of my research I needed to research into the conventions of trailers, posters and magazine cover so I found many websites using google which contained information on trailers, posters and magazines such as ehow, blogspot and many more.

- I used a few trailers sites to watch trailers which I could use in my research such as trailers spy, trailer addict and the most obvious, youtube!

- As part of the audience feedback part of my research not only did I create the poll on my blog but to get people to take the poll and look at my work I posted my blog page and some information on the social networking site facebook as most people I know have an account and would be willing to help me by feeding back on my work.

- Part of the usefulness of my blog was that it was linked to the blogs of other students in my class which made it easier to view and comment on each others work – there is a comments section down the right hand side of the blog page where these comments can be viewed.

Creating my trailer:- As part of my research I needed to look more closely at the pan’s labyrinth trailer to make mine similar – especially in terms of timings – to do this I downloaded the trailer onto my desktop as a film file and inserted it into premiere elements where I could look at it in so much detail and break it down and decipher tranisitions

-As I filmed my trailer I got used to using the camera more frequently, as a photography student I use still cameras fairly often so it was different getting used to filming a moving object.

- It was the editing, however, that took up most of my time and patience; I had never used the editing software before (we used premiere elements 2) so how I edited certain shots became better and more complex as I became more used to it. My skills developed greatly from someone who didn’t have a clue to someone who felt they had been using it for years.

- In terms of using a camera I needed to know what types of shots there were and which ones I should use to capture the mood and atmosphere of my chosen genre which I think I managed in particular in the high angle shot where I’m circling around the girl – it makes her look small and vulnerable

- In terms of editing, necessity was learning which transitions worked and how to make look smooth and also how to changed the color and tone because I needed a specific mood portrayed and some shots just didn’t turn out how I’d visualized

Photography, Photoshop and publisher:

- Some of the shots in my trailer were so quick that it was easier just to insert a still image rather than bit of film – these images I edited as necessary on Photoshop

- To create some of the blue tones in certain shots I didn’t use the color tool in premiere but I edited a blank image on Photoshop by selecting the blue color I wanted then changing the canvas size to that on premiere and then just inserting it as if it was a piece of film. When in the time line on premiere I was able to change the opacity of the image so it looked like there was a blue tinge on the piece of film creating a colder mood in the trailer.

- I used Photoshop to create my movie poster; I’ve used Photoshop before during photography lessons so I had quite a wide knowledge about using it already. I didn’t really need to know anything complex either – I was able to add in text, layer images and change the opacity, color and tone to make the image cold and creepy

- Using publisher was more of a challenge however because it’s not a programme I’ve used much – however once I got started it was difficult to figure out. For some of the more complicated editing of - like the Oscar - I would open it in Photoshop then reopen it publisher and carry on.

Sound recording:

- I only used sound recording for my audience feedback however I had never done it before so was something else that as totally new to me – I went about it in two ways:

- The first person I interviewed I used an average cam corder which I pointed at the wall and it picked up the sound which I then transferred onto premiere and changed the video from a blank wall to an image of the magazine which I then uploaded onto youtube and added to my blog.

- The second way I used was a voice recorder – a little remote which recorded sound which you could upload through a built in pen drive – I uploaded this sound and put it to images of my poster and trailer and then onto youtube and my blog

PowerPoint:

- My evaluation is mainly being produced on power point because it’s creative yet informative

- Most of my power points contain only text and images however for my first power point on trailer conventions I had to learn how to embed/ add a video onto a presentation. This meant I had to change the types of all my videos from avi to mpeg so that they would play; I also tried adding videos using insert>object>custom animation however the easiest way was to ‘add movie’ however the video is linked to the folder it’s contained in so it may be that the videos don’t play on other computers