Final media products

Here are my final three finished media products within my promotional package I have created.


Film Trailer

Film Poster

Film Magazine

Construction Update

I am now into the last week of editing and working on my trailer. I have already created a draft trailer, as this was a draft trailer we decided to make it a teaser trailer rather than a theatrical trailer . As we had not filmed all of our shots,with this I have shown a focus group that are in the age range of my target audience and have gained feed back on what they thought.



Key areas to focus on with editing in the last week

Firstly, our foucs group thought that out trailer music was apporopirate to the genre but also relfect a slight elemnt sof the horror genre. I  know that to improve on the music and to help convey the genre of Psychological thriller, I will need to add Sound effects. Especailly the shot of one of our actors in a hospital like setting, we reallly want a heart/vitals monitor beep in the background to help convey the story line and the narrative in the shot. As some of our focus group said they thought she was dead rather than in a coma.

Secondly, I feel that within our trailer we have quite a few zoom-ins. As some of our focus grouoped picked up on this, I feel that motioning the shots will give greater shot variety and not look so repetative and make the shots flow more easily. As agian one of the shots in the hospital like setting zooms in on the actors face and i feel that this shot would look better as a motion shot and have tighter framing than just a zoom.

Thirdly, I also feel that from out focus group feedback that some of our audeince were confused to what the 'trauma' the girl had gone through and what the starting point for this 'domino effect' of events. I feel that having a shot of a family, such as a family potrait burning giving a sense of how the narrative starts and how the course of events unfold.

Finally, I also feel in the beginning of our trailer where there are panning shots of the forest there should be a possible voice over. As i feel this will help explain the narative a bit better and leave the audience less confused to what the catalyst of the evenst acctually is.

Evaluation

Evaluation questions

• Question1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 

Film trailer : I chose to use a website called emaze.com to present my evaluation into the conventions I both developed and challenged within my trailer.

Film Poster : I chose to use a website called Thinglink to present the evaluatuion of my Film poster

• Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary text ? 

• Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?   
  

• Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research planning and evaluation stages? 

 



I used cam studio to create videos to show how I constructed my final magazine and poster using photoshop.

 

 

 

 

Draft Film magazine

After looking into several film magazines curently circulating in the UK and internationaly, i narrowed it down to the three top film magazines I liked the most. This was Empire, Sight&Sound and Total Film.  I chose these three magazines as they varied from each other but has some similarities and are my main influences for creating my own film magazine.

I created a padlet wall showing what I liked about the three magazines

 Created with Padlet

The magazine I feel will be my main inspiration is sight and sound, as I like the simplicity of the magazine and the good quality images and the easy-to-read layout, I find this magazine most attractive to look at. Howveer I do like the other magazine front covers thought I feel that because the main cover images are commonly full body shots such as Empires 'Thor' I feel this adds more focus on the 'Famous' actor portraying the chracter and the main promotion for the film. Also that the actor/s is the main selling point of the magazine rathre than the films story line or reviews. 

I chose three images i felt worked well with my ideas: 

 

I have chosen to use the last image, of the girl with her finger over her lips. As i feel this helps to portray the secrets behind teh book and the narrative of the film. I also like the lighting with the picture which helps to add enigma to the front cover image and as i want my magazine to have influences from SIght&Sound I have chosen to have a tight head shot. 

I brain stormed ideas for my Film magazine name, headline and sidebar text. 

Name

Film and media FM

Film media and TV FMT

Snap shot

Movie clip

Critique

Film reel

Project

Project F

Tag line

Don't judge a book by it's cover

What lies beneath

Don't trust a pretty face

We all have secrets..but maybe not this one

Title of the film

Animus

Side bar

+ 5 pages of film cover posters

+ a look back at 2014 best films

+ review of the 2015 oscar winners

+ interview with producer of upcoming dark comedy 'The voices'

+ chance to own tickets to opening of feature film Animus

Feature

+ a look at the new upcoming film 'animus'

+ interview with leading lady Eilis O'keefe and her ideas on the film

+ take a look behind the scenes

I used Photoshop to created my Draft film magazine  

 

I got feedback  from my draft poster, from this feedback I found that some of teh shapes especailly the barcode  in the bottom right hand corner of the  magazine. Also that the text in my side bar should  be different colours for the main articles in my magazine. 

One key point of my magazine that was pointed out was the typo within my title, I found  the feed back on my draft trailer very useful and informativewhen it came to the changes I made  on my final film magazine. 

I decided to chnage the image as I or effered the lighting in this image as if it was a spolight on  the book and the lighting of half of her face and half in shawdow. I felt this added enigma to the cover but also it is a more simplistic image not giving too much of the film away.   

Final film magazine 

                                                

                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Draft film poster

Making my draft film poster 

Before creating my flat plat I researched into film posters in my genre I found a film 'Anna' to be my main inspiration for my film trailer. 

Flats plans - 

I create a draft flat plan for my film poster so that when it came to creating it in photoshop I already had some and ideas as a base and was able to imporve and develop my ideas. 

I then created my draft film poster using photoshop, to show the stages it took to creating my film poster i used cam studio to record the process using the layers. From my flat plan idea I changed the main image on the poster as, I chose to not have the knife and place the tag line as writing in the book. I felt this gave the book a greater enigma and more relation to the story.             

Feed back on Draft film poster 

Fromt the feed back I recieved from my film poster focus group, I had similar likes and improvemnt ideas from most the poeple. 

The main advice and improvment ideas I found from my audience feed back were that the main image was good and people liked the mystery and enigma it created. However, they also said that it was difficult to get a sense of story line or plot from the one picture, on the other hand others said that they thought it was about a tragedy and that the book may have an important role within the film or that it belong to a killer or sociopath. From the audience feed back I also recieved comments about the repetition of the line "The ending is always the best", people said that they understood why this was done as the book had the ink blotch effect but others said that maybe have a different tag line as this may help construct the story line that I wish to come across in the poster.

From these ideas I decided to change my poster from a teaser to a theatrical as I felt I could portray the story line better but still retain the enigma that the main image created in my orignal poster. I chanegd the oreintation of my poster from portrait to landscape, as I felt the main image sat better on landscape poster rather than portrait.  This also allowed me to add extra images to help the narrative flow better and be presented more clearly yet still creating a sense of mystery as this is one of the key conventions of the psychological genre. 

I created this collage of images that I had created to use on my new final film poster, I wanted to have a variety as I wanted to experiment to see what image best suited the poster.

Final film poster 

After Effects

Learning about Adobe After Effects in one of our lessons, allowed me to have a better understanding of how to use the After effects programme and how to create effective looking titles that link with our genere of film.

In the lesson we were given a simple tutoriaol on how to create a title for our film trailers using basic tools in After Effects . I used Cam studio to record the fil title I had created and show the effects I had used.

This is a screen shot of the name of our film which will be placed towards the end of the trailer. 

 

This was my practice/draft title in after effects, I then went onto create another After Effects title. I wanted to put an image behind the title 'Animus',  and then for the words to zoom in and only show part of the image.

 

 

I chose to use a piece of footage that was just the main characters eyes, but showing no emotion and looking very distant. I then placed this behind the title 'ANIMUS'. I use various key frames to position the title over the eyes and then zoom and enlarge the scale of the font so that it only showed on eye. 

Filming: Locations

I filmed in various location and tired to film as much as possible so that when it came to editing I was able to chose from a wide variety of shots and ensure that if there was a slight problem with one shot that I would have filmed multiple shots of the same clip.

Each time I went out filming I decided to take a picture of where I had filmed to keep a record of each place, I then created a slide show to present these still images of the places I had filmed my trailer.

Film titles and font styles

As I begin to move on with my film trailer, I need to consider my film titles and font styles. I looked at a website called Art of the title, which is a leading online publication on the creative processes behind the art of title sequence design. It spans out to film, television, conference, and videogame industries.

On Art of the title I looked for clips that incorporated films belonged to the psychological thriller genre. Such as this clip made by William Somerset looking at the film trailer for Seven.

This isn’t going to have a happy ending. —William Somerset 

Also when looking at film posters I created a Prezi to anaylsesome Psychological thriller film posters such as 'Anna' and 'Seven'. When analysing these films posters i saw the oputunity to look into detail at the type, size and style of fonts used on the film posters, I found this o be a great help in assiting my choices inchosing font style and size for my owm film poster and possibly my film magazine.



After anaylising the fonts of mulitple film posters, I used dafont.com to find a range of fonts that I could possibly use when creating my film poster. 

For the image on my fiml poster I am using a black book, the writing within the book has to be hand written but very loose, singature like. I used dafont.com to find fonts like this style, I found three fonts I liked and was able to type the words 'The ending is always the best' into dafont.com and see what it would look like in the font styles I liked.

Since I had to write up the words into the book I printed off the image above and traced over the font styles to get an idea and practice writing in that style.

Music for my film trailer

Afetr researhing into generic fiml trailer music I wanted to look at music and sound FX from trailers that were the same genre as mine; Psychological thriller. I chose to look at Seven and Shutter Island to analyse the music in deopth however, I looked at  several other trailers for inspiration and noted down a few things.


Looking at Psychologial thriller trailers -

I created a mood board of all the different film posters that fell into the Psychoilogical thriller category, I have watched each of the films trailers I have placed on the mood board. I watched these film trailer and took some notes and inspirtaion of the things I liked and could possibly incorporate into my trailer. I then took two other trailer in the psychological thriller genre; Seven and Shutter island and analysed the music and sound FX in moer depth, to really understand how to create an eerie, enigmatic atmosphere within a psychological thriller trailer.





Analysing music for a Psychological thriller trailer -


Seven -

The music in a typical psychological thriller trailer is broken up into 3 parts, these parts are easily recognised in the trailer SEVEN.



Shutter isalnd -

The music in the SHUTTER ISLAND  trailer follows typical conventions of film trailer music. The 3 sections are clearly emphasised and the tones and instruments used provide the atmosphere and mood that directors wish to create in a psychological thriller trailer, to entice the audience to watch the film.  

When looking for music to accompany my trailer I found various websites that provided free copyright music and sound FX.

I found these sound effects from FREE SOUND

• http://www.freesound.org/people/unfa/sounds/156692/ - sudden shock or change in events 
• http://www.freesound.org/people/ayamahambho/sounds/113595/ -  use for more isolated shots , alone in the woods. 
• http://www.freesound.org/people/Airborne80/sounds/219187/ - whispering hearing voices ect. 
• http://www.freesound.org/people/genelythgow/sounds/203558/ - as a base line undertone through the trailer

After filming some shots for our trailer and then editing team in After effects I decided that we needed other sound effect such as when she is in the hospital suite. As from our audience focus group I found that many people thought she was dead an dot rather confused about what was going on the plot line. Therefore I though fit best to maybe use a heart/vitals monitor sound FX to ensure that people know she is in a coma rather than thinking she is dead and to add a bit more clarity to the plot line of the trailer.

I found these sound FX on FreeSound to use within out trailer for the heart/vitals monitor

A key learning point I took from looking into film music, I learnt about the varying styles of music that need to be in my genre of traile. I aim to find a sisnter music track that has varying tempos, thereofere when it comes to editing my trailer the shots I use I plan to fit them to the music of my trailer. This will help when creating a climatic montage and fitting music to the shots to add a mysterious atmosphere.

Scripting my Trailer

In the lessons we looked at scripting for other film trailers both teaser and thetrical, we also loked a the element of using a Voice over and the conventions and functions.

Voice over –

·         Gives background information

·         Introduces scene setting etc

·         Showcase narrative and stars

·         It gives importance of production makers

·         Sense of anticipation

·         Reinforce the title of the film

·         Voice over scripts tend to summarizes story (5-8 lines)

Voice over commonly replace by inter-titles and character narration/commentary 

Scripting  -Looking at scripting for other trailers 

The Woman in Black  - 

In the lesson we got given a script for both the teaser and thearical trailers for "The Woman in Black". We then watched the trailers and annaylised the scripting of trailer.

Teaser trailer - 

Theatrical trailer - 

After looking at the scripting of the Woman in Black trailer,  I then explored scripting within trailers of my own genre. I looked at Seven, Shutter Island, Memento and Black Swan.
From looking at scripting for these trailers I found that there is little 'lengthy' dialogue and more 'one liners'. Also that there are between 1-3 conversations within the trailers that are commonly broken up by montage shots or the conversation carries however, the image on the screen changes. This is the use of off-screen dialogue.


The scripting for my trailer