For research purposes I have used the internet a lot. Particularly websites such as Google, YouTube and IMDb.
I used YouTube to watch trailers from existing horror films to decide on the genre of film I wanted my trailer to be based on. 
Whilst watching the trailers I made notes about what generic conventions were evident in the trailers and which ones I could possibly use in my own trailer. We researched trailers such as The Blair Witch Project on YouTube, which helped us explore the idea of how to film a whole trailer with just a handheld camera and still make it a realistic horror/thriller trailer. It also helped show us how effects such as Bad TV on Final Cut Pro can give a realistic handheld camera feel to a horror film. I also watched the DVD release of Halloween (1978) which contributed towards the restricted narration we wanted to add to our own trailer, Most of the killings in Halloween (1978) are shown through restricted narration and there is only one that contains body horror which is when Lindsey’s boyfriend is killed. Another key convention that I found during my research on the internet and through DVD’s was low key lighting, and it’s been added to create the mood and atmosphere which also makes it appear scarier. I saw this when Laurie is looking around the house in Halloween, and the mise-en-scene slowly reveals more and slowly turns lighter when bod
ies are found gradually becoming more and more shocking.For the filming of our trailer, we used a handheld digital camera and a tripod for some of the establishing shots. During the editing process we used Final Cut Pro on an Apple Mac. We used transitions such as Bad TV, fade in and out, the cut and razor blade tools and amplified sound using the pen function. Each of these transitions helped improve are trailer to make it look more like a horror trailer. Bad TV, is a transition that a lot of handheld horror trailer films use to create tension as the static shots that go fuzzy block out parts of the trailer you want to see. We used the fade in and out transition to make the trailer run smoothly, then it changes from intertitles (mostly using the “A” function under to the viewer) to moving film.
We also used websites such as soundbible.com to create some of the sounds effects during the trailer, an example of this would be the ‘swooshing’ sound effect added to our moving production company intertitle at the start of the trailer, which I made in stages on Adobe Photoshop.
The construction of both my ancillary products, my magazine cover and poster, meant I had to use Photoshop even more. I had used Photoshop before so this wasn’t a hard task for me however, it was very time consuming, as I had to play about with various adjustments to make them both look like realistic products. I was constantly adjusting the "levels" on my photo and the sharpness so it looked better than the original version of the image, and also so it had more of an atmosphere to it. I also had to adjust the opacity on the images on my poster to make it more of a sinister photo rather than a realistic image.
I used Blogger to post all my work on, as it is an easy was to access it. An advantage of this would be the accessibility of the program; you’re able to access it anytime (provided you have internet access) and it means can’t lose all your work as data online is very hard to be deleted. Another advantage would be the way you’re able to personalise your own blog; I did this by changing the image at the top of my blog’s page, I also changed the colour design to fit in with the ‘horror’ genre. A disadvantage, however, to using the blog feature would be that it is time consuming to get to grips with certain aspects of the website. I also used websites such as Flickr, to analyse my final magazine and poster images, and YouTube to upload our trailer so that everyone was able to view it and rate it.
Overall, new media techniques were vital to the success of all my work, and I’m happy with the results from using them.
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