This weeks plan -Tuesday lesson

Imogen have brought in her laptop, so we can both have a final run threw of our trailer. We also plan to include a few more titles and credits, (as in my personal view), i think it looks a bit more like a film clip rather than an edgy, fast paced trailer. To counterbalance this on Tuesday, we are both going to observe our piece and choose points we both agree on, on where to add the appropriate credits.
The picture shown above is a "Typical" ending to a trailer,which often includes information for the audience such as

• The name of the distributor
• Production
• Name of the director ( often if they are very well known) and who it was written by
• Name of the movie
• Logos
• And most commonly - other forms of information such as movie websites that promote the films

We already have already planned our together what we are going to include in the final slide of our trailer. Most basically, we are going to include the name of our film. Uncommon to other trailers, we are going to include our title on a page of its own, considering this is our first production. This credit page above ( for Super 8), has clearly been designed to draw attention to the title instead of the artwork.
Imogen's laptop at the moment is broken, however, it will be back tomorrow. Meanwhile we are focusing on our poster ( as our poster product is near completion). For the time being, we already have our chosen image for our poster but we are not certain which texts look good together, considering we don't want our two prints products to look identical as they will be advertised in different places and for different reasons for example the Empire cover is aimed directly at film fans, whereas hopefully, our poster will be advertising to everyone as it could be advertised at a bus stop, billboards, radio and television stations.

My Audience Research-( To help with the evaluation )

The picture above is the questionnaire i have recently been handing out around Sixth Form to get some audience feedback on our print products. The graph below shows my results -

This pie chart shows the answers. the question was " What genre do you think the poster represents"

This pie chart represents "What do you think is the best part of the magazine cover?"

This bar chart shows the answer of the participants. it was "Do you think it represents the horror genre well?"

• The majority of the feedback was positive. One question i included in the questionnaire was
• "Please state on advantage and disadvantage of the poster?"
• we received answers such as 
• it advertises the film very well and looks very scary
• very clear image, however, there is no tagline
• you can understand straight away it is a horror film - but some of the font is difficult to read

Some people also wrote a few improvements we could use such as "make the front cover less crowded" and "not to place a lot of text across the image. So the main critism was that our poster had to much font and looked a bit over crowed. To compensate this, we have returned to our print product and we are going to alter some of the text to different parts of the page and at different angles to make they visible however not overcrowding so our print products don't come across as "tacky".

Basic points for our evaluation

Plan for my evaluation
Main problems we came across

• Unreliably actors
• Poor setting choice ( because of the distance)

Even though, when I first visited our setting, I knew it would be perfect for our film, after we had to revisit to get some extra footage, it became a real problem, travelling miles in a school day and we also had to make sure we arrived at the right time so the lighting was correct - ( as we wanted to film around 4, when it began to get dark, but still light enough for the camera to pick up the image). Also, considering 2 out of the 4 of us (Emma, Liam, Me and Imogen) have part time jobs on weekday and weekends, we had to choose a date that was appropriate for all of our team members. however, the setting i found was perfect for all of the things we required from our movie setting, such as very large trees - to create the atmosphere of darkness and unwariness and it was also a very remote area which i noticed when i was first visiting the area while walking my dog. While we were filming, we did not run into a single member of the public - this keeps our setting true to the story of being a remote place where nobody visits, coming across as more dangerous. 

Editing

One of the main concerns we had with editing was the light. we though we would play it safe by filming at the end of day when it began to get dark, rather than filming at night. An advantage of this is that, even though the image we got is very light, we could dull/darken it down with our editing software. even though this takes a bit more effort, we wanted to make sure we didn't lose any footage because of poor lighting. in the end, even though our film is still very ( and this doesn't convey the typical horror style), we are certain, in our time frame, we will make our image alot darker, as it is very unlikely that horror films are based in the daytime. For example,Amityville Horror (2005), only around 15% of the film was shot in daylight and the rest was at night time -  this being because of the uncertainty. However, we are at a disadvantage considering we do not have the best technological equipment. Our camera had quite poor sound recording quality and we had to make sure it wasn't to dark, otherwise we could pick up the image. Staying with editing, we finally have our editing of the title finished ( with help from Darren Elliot), it contains both transitions of the text and a 3D quality. 3D texts use 3D primitives to draw the audiences attention to the lines of the text on the screen - therefore making it more eye catching and standing out to other competitors.

Also, our print products are now of a very high standard ( pictured above), you can see we have remembered to stick to our original colour scheme - that consists of red, black and white).

After I completed detailed research in Empire front covers, with Imogen’s art skills, we were able to produce a very original looking movie poster.

after i research empires - ((July 2008 )The Dark Knight (2008)), even though it is not in the specific horror genre, the print product itself comes across as very threatening. they do this by the use of scratching lettering on the cover - it is meant to suggest to the audience that it was done by using a knife(suggesting that he is a very dangerous character, that frequently carries weapons). To convey our research, we knew our main priority was to convey the feeling of terror and our main character becoming scared. Emma ( Our female actor), has her hands across her face to suggest that he is being chased and cant even let the "killer" know where she is and they could here her breathing. While was took, this photo, we were planning to use a long shot to show the environment, but we found that a close up was much more effective for representation fear in our characters eyes. We also research further in both Empire and Total film into the text that is shown on the front of horror film advertisements on there magazines. We decided to use words such as

• Intruders
• Horror
• "Who's watching you?"
• Also, we included the name "Stephen King" - (known by most of population as an amazing horror writer)

Also, a very conventional representatyion is the colour red represenitng blood. Shown in the film two Empire covers above ( The Shining and The Dark Knight), both extreme/mid close up. In our orgininal plan, we were planning on shooting a long shot, however, after extensive research, we found that if we really want to convey horror, we really need the audience to see the characters emotion close up. As you can see, our magazine cover and The Shining cover, are very similar, both in the shot used and the colour scheme ( the use of red again)

It is our 4 week deadline today and we currently have the majority of our work done, including the trailer, as we have been editing that for many months. the main thing we plan to do with our video before we finish it to add in the title and also add in some audience feedback, otherwise known as "critics opinions". In todays lesson, i am improving some of the print products to a higher standard.
We have also been researching print products such as The Exoricst and Psycho and the Scream poster, I have also noticed that they all have similar things in common, that make them stand out such as very bold bright text and the colour scheme. for example, Psycho's advertisement, it has very, very eye catching red text, which looks even more eye catching against a black and white background. the fact that is also doesn't use any colour makes the image and the title look even more relevant. it is quite obviously aimed at the audience who enjoy horror and people can get this impression just by looking at an advertisement. it also makes the audience feel anxious and gets them thinking about what the film will be about.
In our print products, we want to convay to same feeling of fear and anxity in our advertisements and we have already choosen our powerful colour scheme of black, red and white because too many colours can often come accross as to confused and people tend to ignore them 

Plan of action

Me and Imogen have all of our trailer footage that we plan to use in our trailer. We acquired the footage over the  last 4 months when me and Imogen first visited our setting together.  For the upcoming week, we are focusing on our print product that we plan to advertise on the Empire front cover. We are both visiting the setting and bring our female actor Emma Dixon to get a more appropriate shot because our last shot was appropriate. Similar to the Eden Lake poster (2008), we plan to have our main actress stood looking mischievous yet innocent. I have been revising recent empire magazine covers and many of them seem to be posed, however, there is no horror posters that look purposely photographed, so we plan to have one similar to the Shining poster that i posted earlier, where it in fact an action shot from the film, but is being used as magazine cover.

Over the next week, we plan to edit the photograph to make it suitable for our trailer, being clearly an action shot but suitable for a professional magazine cover. We plan to use editing techniques such as tint to make the picture and the atmosphere seem darker considering it is a horror film. We plan to make a clear link between the film and poster, thus making the film more memorable.

In the next couple of weeks we aim to finishes our video, as we still need to include our title, some more editing effects and some movie captains. We also have a few more shots to make up the missing time. In the next couple of weeks, we are also going to start planning our evaluation answers and we will post them on our blog as we go. our advertisement print product is nearly finished as we have editing it and have also added text and information to promote our trailer. The main difference between our two print products it that our advertisement includes a lot more text whereas our movie poster will basically just be the title and our main image of our female actor in the woods looking panicked.

By the end of this week, we will upload a copy of our trailer on our blogs, we also plan to upload a copy onto Youtube to get a wider range of audience feedback. We already have a copy on Facebook and I have recently uploaded the responses. However, as we have not included the titles or any text to our trailer yet, we will keep updating more recent and better developed trailers.

Eden Lake (2008) - analysis of the poster

Recently, over the winter holidays i watched Eden Lake (2008) and afterwards saw the movie poster that advertised the film. I wanted to use similar features from that poster in ours, so i have contacted Imogen and we plan to take a final picture of our main character in the woods before we can back to school, were we can start to edit. the poster above has clearly been edited to make the figures in the background look more myusterisis, whereas, the main female character, is shown in a light suggesting she is more innocent compared to the other. we plan to take a picture tonight of emma that is similar to the poster above, however, if we edit someone scary in the background, we would only have one figure, as our myth is based on one girl coming back for revenge.
the picture below the Eden Lake poster is one of our out takes from our photo shoot. as it is an out take, we do not plan to edit it any furthur because we are focusing on the image we choose as our media poster which i will upload tomorrow. however, on the picture we chose, we plan to use a very dark black tint to make it look like it is night time and very haunting. this image clearly that shows that our film is primarily based in the woods and our actor clearly look distressed.