New Media - Facebook

To research into our target audience, I sent out our questionnaire to some friends on facebook through a message where they replied with their answers. This is a good way of getting to our target audience as most people who like youth culture films tend to be younger ages. But also facebook has many different age ranges so it is easy to find your target audience. I also used googlemail to get some of my results.

Social Realist Conventions

This genre involves social issues within poverty and contemporary culture. It represents the youth of today and is very real to how they act today. It is closely based on youth from a working class or lower who live in the inner city, following the lives they live and social problems they face and how they deal with it. this type of genre is portrayed in films such as Adulthood, Kidulthood, This is England, Shank, 4.3.2.1 etc. Many of them involve gun crime, sex, drugs and alcohol abuse and gangs. Some may think that it is exaggerated but it is the story of the unseen side of teens coping with social problems. For our film to be successful we will need to follow these conventions of gun crime, drugs etc. but also costumes, languages, accents etc. For example you will find that in many of these films, the characters tend to wear their hoods up, and have an accent where they use slang, portraying the type of character they are.

Adobe Photoshop CS3

For our magazine cover and film poster we will be using Adobe Photoshop CS3 to edit our images and produce our cover and poster. We all have easy access to it at college, and we all have used it before so have some skills in using the software. Photoshop is a good software for us to use as it has many features that we can use. There are the basic features for editing the images such as brightness and contrast, levels and curves, hue and saturation etc. It then also has features like layers which will be helpful for us when we are using different layers like texts and backgrounds. The brush tools will help us to put on certain images. They are many effects that we can use on images to manipulate them and edit them and make our covers more effective and creative.

All of us are happy to use Photoshop and are comfortable with the software.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/software/review/2007/05/22/Adobe-Photoshop-CS3/p2

Final Cut Pro

Final Cut is the software that we will be using to edit and create our trailer. This software has many effects that we can use to improve our media. It has features such as ‘SmoothCam’, which will make any of our scenes that are slightly shaky more smooth and straight. This feature works while you also work on editing other parts of the filming, so that helps make it less time consuming.  It also has transition effects that we can use for our shots. They will make our scenes look more effective and powerful and we can also use them to speed up or slow down the pace of the trailer so that the genre is portrayed more effectively.

As we have title cards in the trailer, Final cut has special features for these where you can add motion graphics and animations to the title cards. This will help to make our trailer more exciting and stronger in the production.

http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/finalcutpro/effects-transitions.html

Sony HVR-V1E

HVR-V1E
We were giving permisson by one of the BTECH media students that were included in our filming to use his camera. This was a Sony HVR-V1E, which is better than the A1E. It still shoots in 1080i but also lets you shoot in 26p giving it a more cinematic look and feel. It has a wider dynamic range which gives more colour and less noise making our final product look more professional.

Sony A1E

The Sony A1E is the camera we will be using to film our trailer. It is a small handheld camera which is ideal for us media students to be using. It is quite compact and with the touch screen all the menu options you can find through that.

Controls

There is a zoom button with you slide left to right to either zoom in or out. As we will be using this frequently it is helpful that it slides so that we can get smooth movement in our filming. The record button is placed where your thumb falls so it is easy for us for when we are using the camera handheld.  There is also the option of changing it into night mode, which would be a good effect for any scenes that we are filming in the dark.

Settings

To get to the settings you have to use the LCD touch screen. One of the options we will be changing most often is white balance. As our locations change from inside to outside, and there will also be times where there is more shade than other scenes, we will have to keep checking on the white balance to make sure the colours are right. We also need to adjust the exposure settings so that we don’t over or under expose our shots and ruin our filming.

When using this camera we will attach a microphone to the top of so that we record the sounds at the same time as recording. When we are using this in our recording we will have record each shot several times so that we can pick which shot worked best.

http://www.dvuser.co.uk/content.php?CID=34

http://www.sony.co.uk/biz/product/hdvcamcorders/hvr-a1e/overview

Use of new media

This is group work that we did in class. We brainstormed different ideas on how we can use new media in our research to find out how people feel about films and to our specific genre. We came up with the idea of getting people to watch trailers of a horror film and recording their reactions and analysing this. Also using our phones to text links to our friends, or some people with Blackberry's can 'BBM' their friends, and those with iPhone's can use 'Pingchat'