Audition Skills (Research)

In this post I will be talking about my first attempt at creating a radio advert through using the Adobe Software called "Audition". I will mention my experiences learning to use this software and why I think this software is the best to use for my future ancillary task of creating a radio advert for my short film.

Before using this software I wanted to first come up with an idea on what the radio advert would be about and what it would roughly include. That is why I created this timeline that depicts what I wanted to include. First I came up with a product that I would sell. I decided to use the children's game known as "Zombie Dice". This meant that I needed to think of sounds that would resemble the genre of the game (horror), sounds that would appeal to a young audience (9 to 12 years old) and fit within a 30 second time frame as that is the standard length of time for a radio advert. As you can see in the timeline below I have clearly written what I wanted to include in my advert and the justifications for them. Something that was really helpful in the production of this radio advert was that when I visited the website for the game it had a text depicting what the game is in a child friendly way. I then read it aloud and timed how long it took to say. It came to 40 seconds long. Once making a few changes to shorten it I then had a script, which was really useful and saved a lot of time than making a script from scratch.
























After finishing my timeline I began working on creating the radio advert for "Zombie Dice". In the picture below you can see the audition software and the final edit for my radio advert from 0:22 to 0:32.5. This piece of software was relatively easy to use. Embedding the audio files was easy to do as it was a simple drag and drop process. As you can see in tracks 1 and 4 I used a fade out. This was easy to do as it only required me to move a square in the top right corner of the track and drag it to the point where I wanted the track to start and fade. Something that I really liked about this software was that I had the ability to change where the tracks could be heard. This was great as it gave the advert some spacial awareness, thus making it appear realistic and therefore more exciting to buy. However, the software did have its problems as well. For example, I wasn't able to put 2 audio files in the same track. This meant that synchronizing the audio together was very difficult to do. Overall I think that this software would be great to use for my ancillary task in my coursework as it is easy to use.






























Here is the final product.

Stabiliser (Research)

Photoshop Skills (Research)

In this post I will be talking about my first attempt at creating a movie poster through using the Adobe Software called "Photoshop". I will mention my experiences learning to use the software and why I think this software is the best to use for my future ancillary task of creating a movie poster for my short film. 

Before I began using Photoshop I wanted to make a rough sketch of what my poster would look like. I designed it so that it would meet the target audience of anyone who enjoys crime. I followed the codes and conventions of crime films by drawing a character in the stereotypical investigator outfit, which is a black suit and tie with sun glasses to make them appear mysterious/shadey. I also decided to draw the title in bold italics. This is because bold italics indicate action and excitement, thus making the poster more interesting for whoever sees it. I chose to do this sketch in order to help me follow a rough plan when creating the poster. This is to prevent me going in any tangents and make the poster less effective to the target audience. 

Once I finished my sketch I began creating my film poster. Here is the final product.

As you can see from my poster I managed to follow my sketch fairly well and changed some elements to make the poster more aesthetically pleasing. The first thing that I did was to blend the middle head to the body. This was fairly challenging as I struggled to fade the neck with the shirt collar. To combat this struggle I went on to YouTube and searched for a tutorial on how to do it. The next edit that I made was to change the colour and lighting of his face to match the other two. I decided to make the shot a bit closer compared to the sketch because I feel it is more engaging and intense, which helps create a good sense of what the film is about.

By researching and using these Photoshop skills I feel more prepared for when I have to make a poster for my short film later on. I am more confident in using the various lasso tools, gradient tool and brush tool.