4) How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

For the duration of our research and planning, we were using the Internet and computer for most of our work. We set up a blog to display all of our work so that people could access it and comment on it. We also set up a facebook page, which we advertised to all our friends and media students, which showed pictures and has status updates where we could advertise or survey and blog. An advantage of facebook is that when we updated the group, people would find out on ‘news feed’ even if they do not visit the site. We did our questionnaire on survey monkey which is a website we could advertise and email to multiple people to get their feedback and handed out questionnaires in case people could not access the site. The surveys were aimed at our target audience. Go to Questionnaires to view the survey answers.

We used the internet for the majority of our research and could find previous teaser trailers on youtube that we could deconstruct and get inspiration from. In the post-production stage of our trailer the two main programmes we used to edit were iMovie HD and Garageband.

A print screen of editing our teaser trailer using iMovie

We had used iMovie before so we were experienced in the programme and able to include more than the basics such as effects, changing the audio etc that would compliment our genre and enhance shots we had taken to make it more horror like. Using iMovie we were able to edit clips to make them look professional and input anchorage, which is essential in teaser trailers. We used effects such as black and white, we could speed up and slow down shots and were able to input overlays of sounds from audio, Garageband and the Internet.

Using garageband to create sounds

Adobe Photoshop was used to create the poster we made for one of the ancillary tasks of our coursework. I had never used Photoshop before and it was challenging at first but once I got used to it, I understood it more. I first had a black background (which was the first layer) in Photoshop and then the second layer was the picture I uploaded that I had taken and it was a handprint on a piece of glass. The handprint was out of blood made from red food colouring and golden syrup and to get a plain background we put a white piece of paper underneath the glass. I selected the handprint from the second layer using a magic wand tool which meant I could have the black background with the red handprint on top. I used different effects such as ‘blur’ and ‘colour balance’ to blend the hand in to the black background but still make it stand out. The next layer was our characters face which I blended into the hand and enhanced the colour to make her eyes stand out. The last layer was an overlay which I downloaded from the internet which added a grainy effect.

To create the next ancillary task which was a website we used wix.com. This was a flash website that was very straightforward and we were able to insert our finished teaser trailer easily. We created a main homepage with 3 pages linked to it and we created a website which represented our genre. The website allowed us to edit it in a way that best suited our genre and represented our teaser trailer as well as other real media products do. Editing features included colours, fonts and animations. We chose to create a dark website that was slow and eerie because it best suited our genre of psychological horror. Animations that we used included a slow appearance of the website heading and a change of colour when the mouse hovered over the link. We used the website maker to its best ability by adding photos and video clips so that the experience created for the audience was scary and intense.

We used YouTube.com to upload our trailer onto the website giving the whole world access to our teaser trailer. This enabled the audience to leave comments about our trailer which aided us in evaluating our own product. From the comments were able to see what was good and what was bad about our trailer from the audience’s opinion.

Posting the teaser trailer onto the social network site Facebook also allowed our target audience to comment on our teaser trailer giving us helpful feedback.


In order for us to have a unique font, we researched scary fonts on the website Dafont.com. It offered a selection of fonts that suit the horror genre. The website allowed us to download our chosen font and put it into iMovie. We changed the colour of the font to red in order for it to show conventions of the horror genre. We were able to add our unique film title to our teaser trailer that was called ‘Pulse virgin’. We chose the font because no one else had it therefore our title would stand out.