rcampbellmedia

Thursday, 26 April 2012

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

We have use a range of different media technologies in the creation of our film trailer. We used a mixture of hardware and software that ultimately benefited the outcome of our trailer.

We used a HD camera and tripod to film most of the shots in the trailer. We edited all of our footage together on the Apple Mac which is another new media technology that is allowing more and more people to grasp and understand the world of filming and editing. We used standard PC's to do most of our research on, search engines such as 'Google' allow you to have any piece of information at the end of your fingertips within seconds. All of these pieces of equipment all made it easier for Ross and I to produce our film trailer.

Using a HD camera is the only way to film now. The picture quality is good for a relatively small device which means transportation is easy. Because transportation is easy it makes it easier to experiment with shots. Our film would not have the same effect if it were shot in a lower definition. The trailer works around the the angle and colours used in each shot and this is where the HD camera really helps us out.

Like I just mentioned, colours were an integral part of the trailer. By using the editing software 'iMovie' we manipulated the colours in our trailer to add a higher amount of saturation. This effect allowed us to expose the genre and add something a little unique to our project. 'iMovie' made it very quick and simple to edit together each shot that we wanted. This is a massive step up from 'crash editing' which is basically cutting up two films. The introduction of editing software such as 'iMovie' means it's quicker and easier to edit your film.

Website are becoming more and more popular and the Internet is growing at a fast pace. The amount of people on the Internet now is vast. Team this with social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook and you have a great platform in which to share media products. The Internet is a great place to promote and advertise media products. By using Twitter I promoted your film trailer in order for it to reach a wide audience.

The last thing on the list is video sharing websites like 'YouTube'. YouTube has millions and millions of users which can watch and comment on your film. By using YouTube we were able to broadcast our film trailer. The comments feature allows us to collate user feedback.

Sunday, 22 April 2012

Evaluation - Audience Feedback

Audience Feedback Evaluation

After gathering the results from the feedback questionnaires (example below), I created few charts to display the results clearly. This was an example of one of the feedback questionnaires we received back, we set out a mixture of yes/no questions, with questions that needed a written response. We did this to avoid repetition for the audience, but also to give us more controlled and topical results.

These are the 3 graphs that I produced, showing the feedback we received. 20 random sample feedback questionnaires were chosen to use for the results.

These are a few examples of the comments our trailer received;

Example Positive Comments

“A good length as it doesn’t give too much away”

“The Bird shots worked well”

“The sudden cut of sound at the end worked well”

“The camera angles created tension”

“The music created a tense atmosphere”

Example Critical Comments

“The music was a little too repetitive”

“A voice over could have been added”

“The trailer was too long”

“A more horror looking font should have been used”

Summary

Overall the comments we received were very positive. The one of the most important statistics was that out of our 20 samples, 19 members of our audience felt that our trailer looked like a horror/thriller film, (which is good considering that’s what we intended). Also 16 members of our audience wanted to see the film after watching the trailer, and 3 of the 4 that didn’t, said that it was because they don’t like horror films. Another important statistic was that 19 members of the audience felt that the length of the trailer was perfect; as this was a concern of ours when we were making it. The main element that the audience suggestested had room for improvement was the editing of the trailer, the comments that we reiceved wanted the edits to be quicker in places, to add more drama. Looking back over at our trailer, I think that it could definetley be improved by using quicker edits, as it will also add to the genre. On the other hand, the main section of our trailer that worked well was the music and camera work. This is pleasing to see, as it took us a long time to think of differnet ways we could shoot scenes, and the music needed a lot of attention, as its one of the most important parts to any trailer; so recieved these coments was good!