Evaluation Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of contructing this product? 

When constructing our two minute opening we used many different programmes.

One of these programmes was Garageband. 

This is a piece of software which allows you to play music into the computer. The Mac has over 100 realistic software instruments at your fingertips. You can find pianos, strings, drums, guitars, and horns — everything from bass to woodwinds. Just create a new track, choose the instrument, and play. We used this programme to create a spooky feel with the music.

We did this by including a childs nursery rhyme which we liked the idea of because our opening involves a young child. (music in horor reserach click here)

We chose the nursery rhyme ‘Ring around the Rosie’ because of the meaning of the rhyme. (for score devlopment click here)

To create the spooky voice, I recorded my mum, Angela singing the tune into the garageband recording. This then was distorted and tuned up to make it sound creepy. I then added a layer of piano playing the notes of the rhyme.

Piano recording 'Ring around the Rosie'

This then was layed with the loops ‘Evolving Atmosphere 02’,’Deep pad’, and ‘Contemplative Synth’. All of these are pre-recorded loops that I put together to create the music.

I decided to not have the singing and the score of the rhyme playing at the same time because it made the music seem disjointed and makes the audience feel on edge.

Final score for Alone (insert here)  

The idea to use the nursery rhyme came from when we watched ‘Woman in Black’ opening titles (click here for full post). This involves a nursery rhyme called ‘If you go down to the woods today’.

The Hardware

The Camera we used was an iPhone 5. When arriving at our venue we found that the camera we had wasn’t as good quality as the iPhone, so we chose to film in that. We used a basic recording video function on the iphone and when transferring the footage into iMovie we changed the shots to black and white. 

The inspiration for using the phone is from The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American psychological horror film written and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. The film was produced by the Haxan Films production company. This movie was filmed using a phone held camera.

By using the iphone we were able to use the friendly user interface. This is where you can click where on the shot you want to focus on. 

This is used in this shot of the gate. In the background you can see it blurred out Harriett walking. 

Another way we used technology to benifit us, was to put it our video online on Youtube. 

We posted our opening first cut online on youtube and asked people to leave comments on what they liked and what we could improve.

All of these comments are helpful in someway. With the comments about the font we changed that due to the fact that the font looked like a slasher film.

The comments about the music are helpful because it allowed us to understand that we are achieving the creepy tone to the music for the piece.