How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages? Cold Blood Evaluation 3

1. Cold Blood
Evaluation Part 3
Beth Quittenton

2. How did you use media
technologies in the
construction, research,
planning and
evaluation stages?

3. When researching, planning and constructing my
horror trailer, I had to use a lot of media
technologies to enable me to do all of the above
effectively and efficiently. When researching
things such as magazine covers, posters and
official horror trailers I used Google Images, as
well as YouTube. By using these two websites I
was able to effectively understand what
techniques professionals use to draw the viewer
into buying a magazine cover; as well as
catching the eye of a potential audience member
with the use of a poster to advertise the media
product; and how professionals use trailers to
essentially ‘scare’ the viewer into watching the
full film.

4. When researching films to gain inspiration for my horror trailer’s
narrative, IMDB.com was a very useful website to go to. It
showed me a huge range of horror films, from more successful
modern horror films, to successful films released in the 1970s-
1980s. This allowed me to gain inspiration for the construction of
Cold Blood. I found The Amazing Spider Man 2 (2014), Evil
Dead 2 (2013) and An American Werewolf in London (1981) all
on IMDB.com and these subsequently influenced the making of
Cold Blood in one way or another.

5. The editing software that my group used to edit
Cold Blood was Sony Vegas. We decided to use
this piece of editing software above others such
as Premiere Pro because one of the people in my
group (Brad Lacey) knew how to use it
confidently. We decided that it would be best to
use that program because none of us were
overtly familiar with using Premiere Pro.

6. We explored a lot of different editing techniques when
in the early stages of editing Cold Blood. One editing
technique that we thought worked well in the final cut
of the trailer was the use of slow motion. We used this
technique after Michael is knocked coming down the
stairs by Jason because we wanted the footage to be in
time and have the same pace as the music, therefore we
slowed that clip down slightly in order for it to fit with
the music and be more effective on the audience.

7. Another technique that we use in our trailer were quick
bursts of images. We wanted to portray that Michael has
experimented on other subjects, but none of them had
been successful. In order for us to show multiple deaths
throughout the trailer we decided to take images of the
deceased victims and show three different images of
them in quick succession. This technique is a “blink and
you miss it” technique, therefore this ensures the
audience to pay more attention to the trailer as
otherwise they will miss the images.

8. We also wanted some of the clips to fade in and out; for
example, when Jason wakes up tied to a chair. We
wanted to mimic how he is feeling after being
chloroformed. When filming we decided to switch the
focus to manual so that we could blur Jason, then in the
editing stages we wanted to make Jason’s confusion
more evident. To emphasise this, we took the blurred
clip of Jason tied to a chair and used a quick “fade in”
and “fade out” to reflect his confusion, and also so that
the footage would directly fit with the music.

9. When editing my magazine cover and my poster
I used several different techniques to make them
both reflect the genres that shine through in Cold
Blood, as well as advertising the film without
giving the audience a false idea of the film. It
was vital that the campaign worked well
together.

10. When editing the image for my poster, I wanted it to have a textured
layer over the top of the image to connote the grittiness of our film.
After looking for a cracked layer on Google Images, I found a
copyright-free textured glass layer that would work well on the
image that I chose for the poster. I positioned this over the eye of the
model in the image. For the textured glass effect I added a new layer
and copied and pasted the image that I wanted to use from Google
Images; I then decreased the opacity on the layer so that it was
prominent, but not over-powering. The layer was to represent how
Jason’s life has now been symbolically shattered because of his
transformation into a lizard-like creature.

11. Another effect that I used in order to make my image look more serious
and make the viewer concentrate more on the model’s face, rather than
the background of the image, was editing the background to make it
look darker. I did this by using the paint tool and selecting the colour
red to connote blood and death, I then coloured over the text, then
lowered the layer underneath the layer for the text. I added a new layer
and selected the paint brush, I then made the paint brush have faded
edges, I then increased the size of the paint brush so that it was a little
bigger than the models face; I then clicked on the models face once and
the background became darker, and therefore allowed the audience to
focus on the models face more. This added layer has made the image
look more serious and more menacing.

12. A technique that I applied to my magazine cover
is colouring behind the text to reflect a particular
scene from within the trailer. The scene/s is when
Michael is violently scribbling out the victim’s
photographs once he has experimented on them.

13. Blogger allowed me to display all of the relevant work
and research that I have constructed in order to make my
final media product. Blogger is an easy website to
navigate, and displays my work in a professional and easy
to see manner. The feedback from the focus group
screening also allowed me and my group to receive
constructive criticism on the first cut of Cold Blood. After
the focus group screening our group then added some
changes to our trailer in order to make it more horror-like.
We added a jump scare at the end, as well as inter-titles to
explain the narrative. We also edited some of the scenes to
make it look like some of the footage has been taken from
a CCTV camera. We now feel that our horror trailer is
successful in what it is trying to sell. The genre’s that our
horror trailer is trying to sell is a psychological/gory
hybrid horror; a horror film that connotes the same genres
is REC. It also now allows the audience to get a clear
conception of the narrative through the added inter-titles