By Liam McMillen

1. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? By Liam McMillen

2. Research and Planning • At the start of the course, when we had to research into the British Crime genre I used the internet to aid me. For my initial research I used the British Film Institute site as it is an education website, as well as reading articles online about the British Crime genre. I looked at Indiewire’s 20 Great British Crime Films. This helped us to guide us on our inspirations for the film and to see what audiences like in a British Indie Crime Film. Official film industry websites and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), an online film database, came in particularly handy when researching specific British Crime Films, such as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. These proved beneficial to find out key details about the film (budget, actors, USP etc) and to find out how they were marketed. The website Launching Films also helped because it kept record with films releases so we could see when was best to release our British Crime Film. • British Film Institute: http://www.bfi.org.uk • Internet Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0208092/ • IndieWire article: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/20-great-british-crime-movies-20130327?page=2#blogPostHeaderPanel • Launching Films: http://www.launchingfilms.com/

3. Research and Planning • When it came to doing trailer analyses YouTube was the most helpful website as it had all of the trailers for the Post-Apocalyptic films we were researching. As YouTube is a 2.0 website and the trailers were all uploaded on the site, it became useful as a form of marketing for films. Box Office Mojo was helpful because it helped me see which British Crime Films were successful and which weren’t, so I could investigate what made them successful. • YouTube: http://www.youtube.com • Box Office Mojo: http://www.boxofficemojo.com

4. Research and Planning • When we were looking into magazines, we knew that our film was independent so we had a choice between Sight and Sound and Little White Lies, but we also had a look at Empire to complete our resesrch.. To decide this, I had a look at the official websites for both to which we decided to choose Sight and Sound. • Another website I used in cooperation with the official magazine websites was the National Readership Survey site and this was because it could provide me with statistics about the readership and the circulation of some of the magazines.

5. My Blog • Throughout the entire process I was updating everything I did onto my blog. This proved very helpful because my teachers could see everything I had done and I could see if there were any holes in my work. . It contains all of our work from the initial idea, to the filming days, to the editing and then finally the evaluation.

6. Production • When it came to actually making our trailer we were lucky enough to have a range of equipment to use. We used a steadicamrig, a slider, a tripod and a track along with the Canon 550D DSLR camera. We also used a wide lense to give our trailer an extra quality. When we recorded the voice over we used a voice recorder and microphone to try and get a clear voice over sound. The Canon 550D used Secure Digital (SD) cards to save the footage and pictures onto until we could put the data onto the computer, which made everything easier.

7. Post-Production • To edit our film trailer we used an Apple Mac computer and the Adobe Premiere programme. This programme allowed us to arrange the clips into the right order, use colour correction to make our trailer more desaturated, add titles, add music and sound effects. We used this programme to edit our entire trailer and it allowed us to do complicated editing, such as split screening, time-remapping, dip to white and colour satuaration. • When it came to producing my film poster and magazine cover I used the Adobe Photoshop programme. This allowed me to use the Sight and Sound cover template and modify it until it became an entirely new issue of the magazine completely designed by us.

8. Sound • We used a voice recording kit and a microphone to record the voice over for our trailer which we used as non-diegetic dialogue. Whilst searching for a soundtrack for our trailer we looked at Incompetech and Audio Network. However, we couldn’t find a track that we could all agree on so we decided to use a famous track. We used Fools Gold by The Stone Roses. Our teacher allowed us to do this as long as we emailed them asking, which we did and then we put it on our blog. • There were also some sound effects in our trailer that we found on the college’s computer database. This allowed us to give our trailer another dimension as we could add in the gun shot effects and the clinks of poker chips and whiskey glasses.

9. Evaluation Both presentation platforms allow a variety of layouts and designs that can make your work both informative and attractive to an audience. I originally planned on only using PowerPoint but it became apparent that my evaluation presentation may come across as dull by doing this so I used Prezi and a YouTube video. For evaluation question 1 everyone in the group recorded themselves discussing different aspects of the trailer and this was edited over the top of the trailer. This makes for a much more interesting presentation than just reading about what we did as we are discussing what we did. YouTube was a valuable website for this task, not only for the researching trailers but for a platform that we could upload our rough cuts, behind the scenes footage and final trailer on. All of our videos can be found on the YouTube channel A2MediaVarndean.

10. Communication • To keep in contact, our group set up a Facebook chat to see who had done what work and to keep up to date. We used this to share photos and to discuss when to meet up. We also had each others phone numbers.