Evaluation Question 3

How did you use your media technology throughout?

In order to create an effective promotional package we had to have good hardware and software in order to make it to the most professional standard possible with no budget at all. 

The first, and arguably most important, was the Apple Mac that I used to create my final products. This came in handy for initial research which was done through the built in web browser Safari. To present the research I used programmes such as Microsoft Word, Pages, Keynote and Microsoft Powerpoint. 

I also used a Canon Digital SLR to film a major portion of my film trailer. This worked well because a tripod could be attached to the bottom for filming which allowed smooth, clean shots that didn’t contain any visible shaking or rattling. 

For another portion of my filming, as well as to take photos for my teaser poster and magazine front cover was an iPhone 6s. Although the first thoughts about shooting a film or tv show on a mobile phone would be that it would look amateur, but Apple itself has been running a competition for the last few years that sees amateur film makers shooting entire films on their iPhones and it has been very successful. The iPhone 6s was one of the first iPhones with the ability to shoot in 4K resolution, which is a higher resolution than even the Canon SLR that was used can even film in. The results were effective for the images and videos that I wished to take and overall I would say that the iPhone provided a shooting experience on par with the Digital SLR camera that we also used. The iPhone provided better low light shots than the camera and was used for the portions of the trailer that were filmed outdoors. 

Photoshop was a very important aspect of my promotional package creation. Photoshop was used exclusively to create the teaser poster and magazine front cover. Photoshop proved to be a very important because of the wide range of image manipulation tools available, for instance, the teaser poster didn’t look threatening enough to me in it’s original form so I changed the saturation, image colours and the shadows etc. in order to create a much more intimidating presence. For the magazine cover I used photoshop to remove the background so that my model was stood against a purely white background, I also used it to create the masthead for my magazine front cover as well as all the cover-lines and other elements that made up the magazine front cover. 

Final Cut Pro was the final piece of media technology that was used. This was used to cut the clips and arrange them into the right order. This is a professional movie studio editing software so it was extremely effective in delivering a professional looking result for my movie trailer. There are many text effects that work extremely well with the trailer, as well as good uses of video effects that make shots more visually appealing to the audiences. Final Cut Pro is an extremely powerful editing suite and I learned a lot about the process of video editing from using it.