RYU APISIT TECHAJIRASIN
A2 MEDIA STUDIES BLOG
CREATIVE CRITICAL REFLECTION
Creating a Website for GratiFly
What is a website?
A website is a collection of documents known as webpages that contain information: images, words, videos, photographs etc...
The main page is called a HOMEPAGE
Other pages in a website are called SUBPAGES
Coming up with the name for the new email that we have to share with each other as neither the 3 of us will be sharing their private emails with each other. My account was hooked up to my YouTube so it could've been worst than others. We first just went with just naming the email something so simple which was gratifly@gmail.com. However to our surprise, the email was already taken! We kept thinking of new simple emails that all of us will remember so easily. At the end, we went with gratifly.movie@gmail.com
We were first going to take a conventional approach of how movies promote their movies. However, Richy had an approach in which it shows the point of view of the antagonist side in which it is a government site. We looked at DEA and other sites for reference.
Why do film produce websites?
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Film are VERY expensive to produce and their success relies heavily on being promoted and advertised effectively. The aim is to promote the media product (film) and get the target audience to purchase it!
Website are just one aspect of film promotion and marketing strategies.
I then thought of a great idea that what if in the website there was a section called the 'Surveillance Section'. This is referring back to Blumler and Katz 'Uses & Gratification' 1974 of how the media is use to find out things around us; in this case the media is being used to find out daily life of the protagonist. It was a brilliant idea and Richy approved of it and we started work on it right away!
All these has a slow frame rate and little slow shutter rate not because the computer you're using is slow; it is actually intentional. We wanted to communicate the fact that the protagonist is being watched whatever he does in his daily life. You can even see MEPA making actions of sending off the GratiFly when the protagonist is doing his work. I also added grain to make it more secret camera like.
How did I do this? Well, it's actually very simple. First I set the camera settings to monochrome; I then set the shutter speed to 1/60 of a second to get the blur effect, hold the camera in place and just burst shoot until Richy finishes his action. I then put all this into Adobe Premiere like a timelapse of ticking the Image Sequence when importing the pictures as individual video frame. I then slowed the video down to 8% which gives an average of around 7 seconds a clip. After that the grain effect was added in 10% and exported as GIF. However, once exported I tried opening the GIF file but it doesn't work.
This resulted in me having to export the video as MP4 and make it as a GIF in GIPHY.com instead. This was also the website I used to create the glitchy font in the opening credits.
Later that day, Richy then told me to make a profile for the Fly aka the GratiFly and Toy's character of The Perfect Boy. He outlined the brief looks on paper and told me to go freestyle on it and take the thing as a guide. I used a combination of Adobe illustrator and Paint.NET to get the entire thing sorted and took me quite a few hours to do both of them.
Initally, Richy found a very cool image on Google(third one). I thought it was cool as well so I asked him whether I could turned it into a GIF. He said jsut do whatever feels right. Therefore I just saved the image and created a GIF rom it! Richy didn't even notice it at first until I mentioned it to him. Once he did, he was surprised and he said that it's cool!.
I also created what is supposed to be a drop down box. We couldn't achieve the full function of a drop down box as WIX doen't have this feature.
We had Mr Simpson, our Media Studies Teacher try out the MEPA website for the first time. He was pleased with the overall outcome and with several feedback to give us. With all changes made, we are now done with the GratiFly official website.
Creating Posters for GratiFly
It was finally time to create a poster for our film. Once again, Richy drew out the outline of what the poster should look like. I realised that we did not have a windex bottle any longer. This means that I have to go out to the nearest convenience store near my house, take it to school and take the photo the next day. After I came back from the convenience store, I do what I can for the day then leave the rest for the next day. I downloaded the font for the "biling credits" and looked up some film posters as a reference in how they do their billing credits.
I did one poster which is different from Richy's in that I referenced Ant Man's poster (The one with just a white background, the title and a very small Ant Man)
It turns out that I like both of them and when I asked people I got a mixed opinion on the design of the poster so it is fair to say that both of them are good enough to be used
Here is the design on the final poster: