2013HannahR

Thursday, 2 May 2013

Evaluation- Question 6: Technologies

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

The main types of technology I have used are-

Blogger
Final cut pro
Garage band
Livetype
YouTube
IMDB
Rotten Tomatoes
Digital cameras
Scribt

Blogger has acted as a sort of diary for throughout the media course, as well as being a source of information. It is wear we have posted all of our planning and research which has built up towards creating the final product. Although I have used 'blogging' like sites before, it was new to me to use them for creating a product like this, however the site itself i found was easy to use overall. As it is a form of social networking site, i was able to download an app for my phone (this was the case for a view of the technologies i used) and blog there which made it more accessible. Blogger was also useful to distribute our product

Final cut pro was the most necessary form of technology in terms of for the editing of the product. It is where we created the rough cuts, the teaser trailer, our idents, and then final product, as well as vodcasts for planning and research. Once you knew your way around final cut it was fairly straight forward to use.

We used garage band to create sound for things such as the teaser trailer, our idents and for the track for the final cut. It was easy to use, the main difficulty was creating a sound track that matched the video footage.

We used sites such as IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes to get information on films as well as critics and the publics opinions on different movies. Both sites are basic and therefore very easy to use.

We used sites such as Facebook and Twitter for distribution and to gain feedback. I am familiar to both sites so creating profiles and managing them was not difficult.

YouTube was where we uploaded our footage, it is in its own right a form of distribution. Anyone had access to watching our film and leaving comments/ liking or disliking to movie. So it was also a way of gaining audience feedback without costing anything.

Wednesday, 1 May 2013

Evaluation- Question 7: Progression

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

I feel like the main difference between the preliminary task and producing the final product is the planning and research that had to be done. The prelim was a 5 minute task that involved no planning or research. We were told which shots we must include and then had to come up with a 2 minute scenario in which the shots must be included. It did not require any editing, just simply to be exported and uploaded to Youtube.
However our final product required research into the genre including things such as shot type and typical characters. We also had to plan our filming specifying when we would be shooting, location and shot types.

Wednesday, 17 April 2013

JW- Slasher history and Target audience

Music heavily influences the fear factor in slasher films, as it effectively increases the tension.

15-24 is the age range commonly targeted by slasher films, as it's considered the ages people are most interested in the features offered by slashers; explicit violence and sex. People of this age group can also be genre fans, and can be drawn in by intertextual references to other films. The secondary target audience includes both younger and older ages, including some in the 24-34 age range, as well as some aged 15 and below. But it's the 15-24 range that remains the most popular, making up around three quarters of the audience figures. Older adults are often useless authority figures, and a common character is a sheriff, usually the parent of one of the teen characters.

Halloween is an exception to Todorov's rule of equilibrium, as it ends with the state of disequalibrium maintained with the sequel continuing immediately on from the first film.

The false scare partially demonstrates hybridity as it usually creates comedy by causing the audience to laugh. The cat scare is a common example of a false scare, as is the backwards walk.

20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. are both examples of high-budget production companies, while an indie company such as Warp Films is low-budgeted.

The final girl, a term created by Carol Clover in her book 'Men, Women and Chainsaws', that suggests that viewers initially share the perspective of the killer, before shifting to the final girl towards the end of the film.

In the 50's and 60's, horror cinema was either Gothic or creature-features, involving monsters and other villains. Universal produced films such as 'King Kong' and 'Godzilla'. Hammer studios made films revolving around characters such as 'Dracula' and 'Frankenstein's monster'.

The main characters were mature adults, usually upper-class. It was the switch to working and middle-class, and younger characters in later horror/slasher films that marked a great change in how the films worked. These older films often look more theatrical and stagey, whereas later films featured a greater use of more 'realistic' settings.

Although a couple of the earliest slasher films, 'Psycho' and 'Peeping Tom' came out in 1960, fears over the violence in them led to the major studios to not dare releasing any imitators. It took the success of 'Halloween' and others a decade later for the sub-genre to really get going.