1. Film Trailers
The purpose of a film trailer is to give a taster for what the film will be like, usually they
show the most gripping parts of the film for example, if it is an action film, the trailer would
generally be showing the parts with the most excitement to make you, as the viewer want
to see it even more. Film trailers have been around for almost a century now as the first
one was released in 1913 and they have adapted a lot since they originally came out, at the
very beginning, the objective of a film trailer was to tantalize the viewers and make them
want to watch the film, which is still the principle today, but the main thing that had to be
done in the early 19th century was just to get certain parts of the film and put some text
with them and that was the mind set back then on ‘gripping the viewer’. Whereas nowa-
days with the new editing and technology, films and their trailers have been dramatically
updated.
Music is an extremely key factor in film trailers, it sums up the entire trailer, watching one
with the sound muted would be boring and wouldn’t interest you in the slightest but when
it is turned on and synched with the editing of the clips, it really enhances the overall
trailer and pulls you closer to wanting to watch it. Depending on the type of film, it is either
dramatic and tense music, or upbeat dance music for when it is to do with something else
like street-dancing or car films. As time progressed, directors of the films realised that
there was much more that could be done to entice the viewer, for example, in the 1960’s
teaser trailers were introduced which was usually a stand still imagine with a slogan and
the title of the film, not giving to much information away but just enough to make you
want to watch the full trailer.
A good example of a fantastic film trailer is the 2012 film ‘The Avengers’. It shows great
footage from some of the clips with some dramatic music in the background to make it
even more intense. It has small bits of text to illustrate when the film will be released and
how anticipated the film has been.
Release
Clip from date
film
2. WWW: The World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is one of the greatest releases in history, we take for granted how
amazing it really is. It has near enough anything you would ever want to know about any
topic. The WWW is near enough the dictionary of life, having anything and everything you
want to find or know about using internet search providers like ‘Google’ which has become
the most popular source for information and pretty much anything you want. You can listen
to endless streams of music and watch videos / movies through it. You don’t have to use a
bog standard computer to access the internet, you can gain access to it from several
different places and devices nowadays. Most mobile phones produced in the last decade
have the option on the internet as you wish, as long as you have an internet connection (in
range of a router/modem). Even then, phones like blackberries and iPhones have their own
type of connections which allows them to connect to the internet whenever they choose,
as it is a type of Wi-Fi. A huge benefit of using the internet is the endless shopping
available to you. You can the WWW to browse through your favourite shops or browse the
web to find the cheapest deals on a specific item you are looking for without having to
move out of your house. Sites like ‘Amazon’ are great examples of this. Amazon has
products of all varieties and has them for fantastic prices as well as shipping globally. Saves
so much travelling to go out and see the shops in a shopping centre you can view
everything with the touch of a mouse. Another great advantage about the internet is social
networking. You can connect and talk with near enough anyone in the world nowadays
from wherever you are using sites like ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’. The WWW allows you to
bypass using phones or going out to see people, as you can communicate and talk to each
other from anywhere. The internet saves a lot of travelling, especially for things like
booking tickets for holidays or trains. You can just go to the website of the company you
are buying from and do It manually from there, instead of you having to go out and
purchase them in person. The World Wide Web has unlimited entertainment for you as
you browse through sites with knowledge on your favourite celebrities or download your
best films for free to watch in brilliant HD quality. Lots of people could not imagine life
without the internet as they grew up with it, but as a summary, it makes almost every
aspect of your social life and work much more interesting and easier for information
grinding and talking to friends.
3. Mobile Phones
Mobile phones are a huge part of everybody’s life in this day and age, most people own
one and if they do not, they most certainly know someone who does. Modern mobiles
have just about anything you would need in your everyday life such as calendars, quick
SMS texting, access to the internet and the new phones even have the ability to download
apps from a store for even more enhanced mobile capabilities, like the ‘Whatsapp’ which
gives you the ability to send pictures freely to your contacts over an application bypassing
the payment option of doing it through a normal text and overall gives you a much more
enjoyable way of talking to your friends and family. The first recognised mobile phones
were implemented in the 1940’s and they were huge, bulky phones which had a very low
battery life and only allowed a certain amount of calls for a period of time. As technology
has evolved since this time, so have mobile phones and they have been modernized a lot.
Mobile phones as of the year 2000 and onwards, have been fitted with technology we all
take for granted when we use them. You can call people from wherever you are weather it
be home / mobile or work. There is near enough unlimited accessibility to the internet
where you can go on any website and act as if you were on a computer with the open web
surfing available to you as you please watching films and streaming videos as you please,
and there is texting, texting is a massive contributory factor to why people have mobile
phones, it is another method of communication except you type instead of speak. Most
people text and do it more than 10-15 times a day without even realising. Phones released
in the past 5 years are the phones of today such as Blackberries, Smartphones and
iPhones. They all have something unique that phones released prior to this didn’t have
anything like it. Blackberries have the well known Blackberry Messenger which is the same
as texting but much quicker and has little things added to it to make it faster and more
enjoyable. Such as you can see when people have seen your message, and when they are
replying. You can have profile pictures and write about yourself so in sense it isn’t just
texting, it is a little social networking application and the majority of people who buy
Blackberries buy them specifically for BBM as of how useful and fun it is. iPhones and
Smartphones are similar, they can have endless pages of apps and have just about
everything you need for what a mobile phone can do for you. Mobile phones will adapt to
the new technology and evolve with what is introduced in the coming years but it certainly
has come a long way since the 1940’s.
4. User Generated Content
User generated content is usually referred to websites and information put onto them.
Most websites nowadays are commonly designed and formatted by businesses using
professionals to design them. Whereas the idea of ‘user generated’ implies that something
is designed and produced by the ‘user’. Which is exactly what it is, when something is
done using ‘user generated content’ it means that a website or a form of media has been
produced by a normal person who isn’t particularly the most experienced nor professional
and even amateur. Another definition of this term, is if somebody who doesn’t necessarily
have the highest standard of qualifications came out of education but still wanted to do
something through technology, they can, the main idea behind user generated content is
that anybody with the intellectual knowledge capable to make websites and forms of
media, can do it regardless of their educational background.
Some of the most popular websites around the web are in fact, user generated. One of the
main ones is ‘Wikipedia’. On here, anybody with sufficient expertise can edit the site to put
Information from their own knowledge to change the definition or explanation of a certain
term or word. This is a site where everybody can work together in order to create an online
encyclopaedia completely designed and daily modified by the general public. The thing
that makes Wikipedia special from most other UGC websites is that there is no author that
gets paid for people editing the site, in contrast with sites which stream music and other
types of media which commonly have advertisements through out your time on the web-
site, and for every one that you view, it sends money to the author of the site / the stream-
er.
Social networking sites like ‘Facebook’, ‘Twitter’ and even the super popular ‘YouTube’ are
all also great examples of user generated content, as with the social networking sites, you
can upload your own photos, videos and even put your own status on to tell others how
you’re feeling. As you are doing it all yourself, it is all user generated. As for ‘YouTube’ you
can view, upload and share videos. There is even an option to share them on the sites
mentioned previously as they are all so popular on the web. More and more sites are
becoming user generated as time goes on, there are people every day designing and
editing websites. User generation is for nominally popular and will continue to evolve for
years to come.
5. Digital File Formats
Digital image formats is the computerized way of organizing and storing digital images onto
depending on which program / device you were using. Image files, like the ones you save
and use every day, are made up of digital data in one of the many formats available than
can then be rasterized for use on your computer screen.
If you pay attention to the type of format on the end of a digital image you may have saved
on your computer for example, jpg or png, they all have their separate and individual
meanings for how big the file might be or what program the image was taken / designed
on and they all have a purpose.
JPEG standing for “Joint Photographic Experts Group” or more commonly known as JPG, is
one of, if not the most common file type for digital photos and other digital graphics. JPG is
also the most common file type for images taken with digital cameras and is regularly used
for graphics on websites like blogs and even social networking sites such as Twitter and
Facebook. The reason why JPG images are so good at what they do is because, unlike GIF
files, which show significant loss in photo image quality, JPG images can have file size
reduction without losing enough quality to make it look distorted or unclear.
A PNG file meaning “Portable Networks Graphics” is a type of bitmapped image format
which was originally created to improve and replace the previous GIF file type as an image
file format which does not require a patent in order to be used. There are hundreds of
digital file formats varying throughout the alphabet as there are thousands of programs
that use different ones.
MOV is a type of video file and a common multimedia format often used for saving movies
and other video files. QuickTime use MOV files as it is a media company popular for its
QuickTime Media Player. An MOV video file functions as a multimedia container file that
contains one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of date which could be
audio, video, effects or text like subtitles.
6. Digital Rights Management System:
The digital rights management system (DRM) was originally intended to be a type of
technological control that is commonly used by hardware manufacturers, online publishers
and any individual with the aim of limiting the used of digital content after a product is
sold. DRM can be any type of technology that possesses uses of digital content that are not
wanted or required by the content provider.
Major companies like Amazon and Apple Inc., use the digital rights management system as
they are such big and popular companies that they need the protection. DRM was first
implemented in 1998 in the United States when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA) was passed. The main intention from this was to impose penalties on people who
make technologies whose main function is to bypass content protection technologies. The
general and primary objective of the DRM when it was first introduced was to act as a form
of protection for companies to combat copyright issues over the internet. Some argue that
the DRM is only there to inconvenience legitimate customers. A lot of people think that
industry supporters of DRM introduced this so that we could not have total control over
out media and devices that we normally would, as a result of this, the other common term
for DRM is digital restrictions management as it is believed to be a way of companies
preventing you from fully owning your media. The true definition of digital restrictions
management is basically, where technology controlling what you can do with the digital
media that you own. For example, if a program doesn’t let you share a song or play an
internet game as you don’t have an internet connection, this is you being restricted by
DRM, in other words, it is a damaging good preventing you from doing what is rightly
yours, and consequently this is creating a dangerous future for freedom, privacy and
censorship.
7. Aspect Ratios 4:3 and 16:9
The aspect ratio of an image describes the proportional relationship between its width and
its height. Commonly, the ratio is expressed as two numbers. The two most popular being
4:3 and 16:9.
The aspect ratio 4:3 is used by most digital cameras. 4:3 digital format popularity was
developed originally to match the prevailing digital 4:3 computer monitors but nowadays
they are used for other aspects of technology. The 4:3 aspect ratio has been around since
the early days of television in the 1940's and 1950's. A television that has an aspect ratio of
4:3 is often referred to as being NTSC, or pan and scan. The majority of analog cable
channels still broadcast in 4:3.
The 16:9 ratio, is another format that has its roots in the APS film camera. The 16:9 ratio is
also the standard image aspect ratio for HDTV. It is gaining popularity as a format in all
classes of consumer still cameras which also shoot high definition. When still cameras have
a HD video capability, some can also record stills in the 16:9 format, ideal for HD televisions
and the majority of widescreen computer displays. The 16:9 aspect ratio is a product of
movie producers. They wanted to find a way to make their movies bigger and better in
order to attract more customers. The widescreen format of the 16:9 aspect ratio allows
users to view a bigger picture when compared to the 4:3 aspect ratio. The 16:9 aspect ratio
also enhances the quality of the image by allowing for bolder backdrops and scenery. The
16:9 aspect ratio is not as wide as what you would see in a cinema, but it is close.
8. Media Players
A media player is a term used to describe computer software for playing back multimedia
files. While many media players can play both audio and video, others focus only on one
media type of the other. These are defined into either audio players or video players and
often have a user interface tailored for the specific media type used.
The most common media players on computers nowadays are windows media player and
QuickTime, and RealMediaPlayer. Apple Inc., uses QuickTime as their media player when
the user wants to playback music or a video purchased through iTunes. Windows media
player is the otherwise known as the default media player. The reason for this is because
every single computer powered by windows regardless of weather it is vista, 7 or even 96,
windows media player comes as standard with the computer and therefore it is the pro-
gram people are the most used to and comfortable with.
Another extremely popular media player is the Adobe flash player originally created by
Macromedia and now developed and distributed by Adobe Systems. This is another type of
software used for viewing multimedia and streaming videos / audio. You can use this on a
web browser or on supported mobile devices. Again, like windows media player, it is very
common to have this program installed on your computer as standard when purchased, or
downloaded not long after.
DivX, is a brand name of products created by DivX Inc., including Macrovision which
became very popular due to its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes
while maintaining relatively high visual quality. Similar to the other media players I have
mentioned, DivX is another form of software used to playback audio or watch video clips.
Except with this program, you can use it as an editing tool for saved media clips for use in
other things as it has programs available to you which allow you to cut or add effects to
clips as well as having multiple audio tracks on the go at once.
