Evaluation Point 4

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

The internet played a major part on the construction of the idea for the teaser trailer and research into pull off the tricks that I wished to use. It also served as a large database of footage of different magicians, mainly on youtube, where you could pick up inspiration on which tricks to do and in what order.

Another website which was useful in this stage of production was 'WonderHowTo. com', which is a website designed for people to share ideas and tips on how to achieve different effects. It is a video from this website which gave me the idea of using a matte over certain areas of the footage to create the vanishing effect, my explination video for which can be seen below.

This also illustrates how useful final cut was in the production stage of my film, whereas in programmes like iMovie, effects like this wouldn't be possible. It is ultimately the knowledge and ease of use of final cut which allowed me to complete the teaser trailer and allowed me so much creative freedom.

The 'voice over' tool in final cut also came in extremely useful when it came to adding in music over the trailer, and the voice over used within the trailer. It also gave a source for the 'white noise' found in all natural environments. This involved putting the film on mute, and holding a microphone up in a quiet room so any natural noise could be picked up and the entirety of the trailer sounded similar and natural.

My own HD quality video camera also allowed for dynamic effects to be used within the teaser trailer. This allowed crisp HD images to be used, and the inbuilt focus setting on the camera allowed different aspects of the show to be brought in and out of focus at will. This is seen below as the camera changes focus from the character in shot to the items on table, much as an eye would focus on different items.

Evaluation Point 3

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

This video shows how audience feedback played an important role in the final look of the poster especially. I showed the original ideas with the poster fonts to peers and friends and some of the fonts didn't appear to be very popular. So I decided to experiment with the fonts that were popular, moving them to different areas on the poster and changing the size of them within the poster. Still the audience feedback on the posters and the fonts wasn't very good, so I went looking around other font libraries, and finally found the font which I eventually settled on.

User feedback from last year's film also played a big part in the initial planning stage for this year's film. Last year comments on my final video mainly sad that some of the shots I used were far too dark and therefore not clear enough on screen. This led to the inclusion of a spotlight within this year's film. The male character himself had his very own spotlight within an extremely dark environment, which was then shone on his 'victim' . This bypassed the obvious problems of lighting such a dark space 'naturally', by clearly showing a legitimate source of light within the setting.

Evaluation Point 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

This video focuses on how the theme of cards and magic ran throughout all 3 pieces. The examples shown are the poster and the magazine cover, where cards feature prominently (as the main focal point for the poster, and as a clear background for the magazine cover). Upon viewing the teaser trailer there are also two memorable card tricks, which will be remembered due to the history of cards within magic.

It also shows how the logo was incorporated into both the magazine cover and the poster to create a link for the audience to recognise. This it an attempt to copy the way most movies use the same logo on every product. I chose to not include this logo within the film trailer because the other title was far easier to animate and I was able to create the optical illusion effect where the viewer was still able to read the word 'Illusion', even though the letter 'I' is missing from the middle of the word.