Tuesday 8 May 2012

3. Q4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? (kieron)

Media technologies played a big part in the making of my media product. We divided responsibilities and from my group I was left in charge of researching, designing and making the horror movie poster. The main piece of software that I used in designing the poster was Photoshop. For taking the image I used a digital camera and for the initial research I used the internet extensively.



In the construction stage the first thing that needed to be done was to create a useable image for the poster. I took the photo for the image by using a Canon EOS 400D camera. This is a digital single lens reflex (SLR) camera made by Canon in 2006. It took me a little time to get used to this particular camera as I don’t usually use SLR’s to take photos. At first I had the shutter speed at a really low setting so my photo came out really blurry but I found out how to change it and got it to the right speed that would work with the aperture setting. One big problem that I had to overcome was that the image of the killer was consistently out of focus; this was because we wanted the image to have low-key lighting. We found out that the shutter speed was too low (1/6 of a second) this shutter speed will only be used in a photo where moving light would be captured, also to get an image in focus it would have to be on a tripod or on a surface that does not move. This shutter speed makes the photo to too light as well, this lead me to making the killers face a bit smaller than originally planned.



The other piece of camera equipment I handled was a Canon EF-S 10-22mm lens; This is the lens in the photo on the poster, however it was featured more for its size than for a technical reason as it was the widest one I could find and therefore allowed me the largest space to place the image of the killer.



Probably the most useful piece of software that I used in laying out the poster and am still learning about is Adobe Photoshop. This piece of software allows you to edit images. Although my Photoshop skills are quite good I was still learning new things about the extent of the software and how it can be applied. One of the new filters I learnt to use was a cloud filter, this allowed me to make my image very spooky and I used it in my poster experiments. I also learnt a lot about colour schemes and how to have colour around the text.



Another vital piece of software I use was the internet for my research; Google is a search engine that started in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google images was the most useful thing about it as that’s where I could find images for inspiration, research, the conventions of horror film poster design, I was also able to compare images with my own poster design.



As well as Google I also used http://www.imdb.com/ (an online movie database) launched in 1990 by Col Needham, ‘imdb’ was good for researching film trailers at the start of the project for conventions and ideas. http://www.dafont.com/ (a font sharing website) Dafont is one of the best website to download fonts and find font, this is where I got the font (Liquid Crystal) for the title in my poster and the ‘Steel Tong’ Font for my credits.

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