Film Trailers

The purpose of a film trailer is to give a taster for what the film will be like, usually they

show the most gripping parts of the film for example, if it is an action film, the trailer would

generally be showing the parts with the most excitement to make you, as the viewer want

to see it even more. Film trailers have been around for almost a century now as the first

one was released in 1913 and they have adapted a lot since they originally came out, at the

very beginning, the objective of a film trailer was to tantalize the viewers and make them

want to watch the film, which is still the principle today, but the main thing that had to be

done in the early 19th century was just to get certain parts of the film and put some text

with them and that was the mind set back then on ‘gripping the viewer’. Whereas nowa-

days with the new editing and technology, films and their trailers have been dramatically

updated.

Music is an extremely key factor in film trailers, it sums up the entire trailer, watching one

with the sound muted would be boring and wouldn’t interest you in the slightest but when

it is turned on and synched with the editing of the clips, it really enhances the overall

trailer and pulls you closer to wanting to watch it. Depending on the type of film, it is either

dramatic and tense music, or upbeat dance music for when it is to do with something else

like street-dancing or car films. As time progressed, directors of the films realised that

there was much more that could be done to entice the viewer, for example, in the 1960’s

teaser trailers were introduced which was usually a stand still imagine with a slogan and

the title of the film, not giving to much information away but just enough to make you

want to watch the full trailer.

A good example of a fantastic film trailer is the 2012 film ‘The Avengers’. It shows great

footage from some of the clips with some dramatic music in the background to make it

even more intense. It has small bits of text to illustrate when the film will be released and

how anticipated the film has been.

Clip from

film

Release

date

WWW: The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is one of the greatest releases in history, we take for granted how

amazing it really is. It has near enough anything you would ever want to know about any

topic. The WWW is near enough the dictionary of life, having anything and everything you

want to find or know about using internet search providers like ‘Google’ which has become

the most popular source for information and pretty much anything you want. You can listen

to endless streams of music and watch videos / movies through it. You don’t have to use a

bog standard computer to access the internet, you can gain access to it from several

different places and devices nowadays. Most mobile phones produced in the last decade

have the option on the internet as you wish, as long as you have an internet connection (in

range of a router/modem). Even then, phones like blackberries and iPhones have their own

type of connections which allows them to connect to the internet whenever they choose,

as it is a type of Wi-Fi. A huge benefit of using the internet is the endless shopping

available to you. You can the WWW to browse through your favourite shops or browse the

web to find the cheapest deals on a specific item you are looking for without having to

move out of your house. Sites like ‘Amazon’ are great examples of this. Amazon has

products of all varieties and has them for fantastic prices as well as shipping globally. Saves

so much travelling to go out and see the shops in a shopping centre you can view

everything with the touch of a mouse. Another great advantage about the internet is social

networking. You can connect and talk with near enough anyone in the world nowadays

from wherever you are using sites like ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’. The WWW allows you to

bypass using phones or going out to see people, as you can communicate and talk to each

other from anywhere. The internet saves a lot of travelling, especially for things like

booking tickets for holidays or trains. You can just go to the website of the company you

are buying from and do It manually from there, instead of you having to go out and

purchase them in person. The World Wide Web has unlimited entertainment for you as

you browse through sites with knowledge on your favourite celebrities or download your

best films for free to watch in brilliant HD quality. Lots of people could not imagine life

without the internet as they grew up with it, but as a summary, it makes almost every

aspect of your social life and work much more interesting and easier for information

grinding and talking to friends.

Mobile Phones

Mobile phones are a huge part of everybody’s life in this day and age, most people own

one and if they do not, they most certainly know someone who does. Modern mobiles

have just about anything you would need in your everyday life such as calendars, quick

SMS texting, access to the internet and the new phones even have the ability to download

apps from a store for even more enhanced mobile capabilities, like the ‘Whatsapp’ which

gives you the ability to send pictures freely to your contacts over an application bypassing

the payment option of doing it through a normal text and overall gives you a much more

enjoyable way of talking to your friends and family. The first recognised mobile phones

were implemented in the 1940’s and they were huge, bulky phones which had a very low

battery life and only allowed a certain amount of calls for a period of time. As technology

has evolved since this time, so have mobile phones and they have been modernized a lot.

Mobile phones as of the year 2000 and onwards, have been fitted with technology we all

take for granted when we use them. You can call people from wherever you are weather it

be home / mobile or work. There is near enough unlimited accessibility to the internet

where you can go on any website and act as if you were on a computer with the open web

surfing available to you as you please watching films and streaming videos as you please,

and there is texting, texting is a massive contributory factor to why people have mobile

phones, it is another method of communication except you type instead of speak. Most

people text and do it more than 10-15 times a day without even realising. Phones released

in the past 5 years are the phones of today such as Blackberries, Smartphones and

iPhones. They all have something unique that phones released prior to this didn’t have

anything like it. Blackberries have the well known Blackberry Messenger which is the same

as texting but much quicker and has little things added to it to make it faster and more

enjoyable. Such as you can see when people have seen your message, and when they are

replying. You can have profile pictures and write about yourself so in sense it isn’t just

texting, it is a little social networking application and the majority of people who buy

Blackberries buy them specifically for BBM as of how useful and fun it is. iPhones and

Smartphones are similar, they can have endless pages of apps and have just about

everything you need for what a mobile phone can do for you. Mobile phones will adapt to

the new technology and evolve with what is introduced in the coming years but it certainly

has come a long way since the 1940’s.

User Generated Content

User generated content is usually referred to websites and information put onto them.

Most websites nowadays are commonly designed and formatted by businesses using

professionals to design them. Whereas the idea of ‘user generated’ implies that something

is designed and produced by the ‘user’. Which is exactly what it is, when something is

done using ‘user generated content’ it means that a website or a form of media has been

produced by a normal person who isn’t particularly the most experienced nor professional

and even amateur. Another definition of this term, is if somebody who doesn’t necessarily

have the highest standard of qualifications came out of education but still wanted to do

something through technology, they can, the main idea behind user generated content is

that anybody with the intellectual knowledge capable to make websites and forms of

media, can do it regardless of their educational background.

Some of the most popular websites around the web are in fact, user generated. One of the

main ones is ‘Wikipedia’. On here, anybody with sufficient expertise can edit the site to put

Information from their own knowledge to change the definition or explanation of a certain

term or word. This is a site where everybody can work together in order to create an online

encyclopaedia completely designed and daily modified by the general public. The thing

that makes Wikipedia special from most other UGC websites is that there is no author that

gets paid for people editing the site, in contrast with sites which stream music and other

types of media which commonly have advertisements through out your time on the web-

site, and for every one that you view, it sends money to the author of the site / the stream-

er.

Social networking sites like ‘Facebook’, ‘Twitter’ and even the super popular ‘YouTube’ are

all also great examples of user generated content, as with the social networking sites, you

can upload your own photos, videos and even put your own status on to tell others how

you’re feeling. As you are doing it all yourself, it is all user generated. As for ‘YouTube’ you

can view, upload and share videos. There is even an option to share them on the sites

mentioned previously as they are all so popular on the web. More and more sites are

becoming user generated as time goes on, there are people every day designing and

editing websites. User generation is for nominally popular and will continue to evolve for

years to come.

Digital File Formats

Digital image formats is the computerized way of organizing and storing digital images onto

depending on which program / device you were using. Image files, like the ones you save

and use every day, are made up of digital data in one of the many formats available than

can then be rasterized for use on your computer screen.

If you pay attention to the type of format on the end of a digital image you may have saved

on your computer for example, jpg or png, they all have their separate and individual

meanings for how big the file might be or what program the image was taken / designed

on and they all have a purpose.

JPEG standing for “Joint Photographic Experts Group” or more commonly known as JPG, is

one of, if not the most common file type for digital photos and other digital graphics. JPG is

also the most common file type for images taken with digital cameras and is regularly used

for graphics on websites like blogs and even social networking sites such as Twitter and

Facebook. The reason why JPG images are so good at what they do is because, unlike GIF

files, which show significant loss in photo image quality, JPG images can have file size

reduction without losing enough quality to make it look distorted or unclear.

A PNG file meaning “Portable Networks Graphics” is a type of bitmapped image format

which was originally created to improve and replace the previous GIF file type as an image

file format which does not require a patent in order to be used. There are hundreds of

digital file formats varying throughout the alphabet as there are thousands of programs

that use different ones.

MOV is a type of video file and a common multimedia format often used for saving movies

and other video files. QuickTime use MOV files as it is a media company popular for its

QuickTime Media Player. An MOV video file functions as a multimedia container file that

contains one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of date which could be

audio, video, effects or text like subtitles.

Digital Rights Management System:

The digital rights management system (DRM) was originally intended to be a type of

technological control that is commonly used by hardware manufacturers, online publishers

and any individual with the aim of limiting the used of digital content after a product is

sold. DRM can be any type of technology that possesses uses of digital content that are not

wanted or required by the content provider.

Major companies like Amazon and Apple Inc., use the digital rights management system as

they are such big and popular companies that they need the protection. DRM was first

implemented in 1998 in the United States when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

(DMCA) was passed. The main intention from this was to impose penalties on people who

make technologies whose main function is to bypass content protection technologies. The

general and primary objective of the DRM when it was first introduced was to act as a form

of protection for companies to combat copyright issues over the internet. Some argue that

the DRM is only there to inconvenience legitimate customers. A lot of people think that

industry supporters of DRM introduced this so that we could not have total control over

out media and devices that we normally would, as a result of this, the other common term

for DRM is digital restrictions management as it is believed to be a way of companies

preventing you from fully owning your media. The true definition of digital restrictions

management is basically, where technology controlling what you can do with the digital

media that you own. For example, if a program doesn’t let you share a song or play an

internet game as you don’t have an internet connection, this is you being restricted by

DRM, in other words, it is a damaging good preventing you from doing what is rightly

yours, and consequently this is creating a dangerous future for freedom, privacy and

censorship.

Aspect Ratios 4:3 and 16:9

The aspect ratio of an image describes the proportional relationship between its width and

its height. Commonly, the ratio is expressed as two numbers. The two most popular being

4:3 and 16:9.

The aspect ratio 4:3 is used by most digital cameras. 4:3 digital format popularity was

developed originally to match the prevailing digital 4:3 computer monitors but nowadays

they are used for other aspects of technology.

The 16:9 ratio, is another format that has its roots in the APS film camera. The 16:9 ratio is

also the standard image aspect ratio for HDTV. It is gaining popularity as a format in all clas-

ses of consumer still cameras which also shoot high definition. When still cameras have a

HD video capability, some can also record stills in the 16:9 format, ideal for HD televisions

and the majority of widescreen computer displays.