Our trailer and our print products

As our deadline is quickly approaching, we have been focuses more on our trailer in school time and our blogging in our own time. Meanwhile, i have been editing the evaluation to get it to the highest possible standard. I have also looked back when we actually did our filming and i have tried to identified some problems areas that we came across. however, from our last filming experience, me and Imogen have learnt that the cameras have a problem filming in dark conditions as they cannot pick up the image very well. To counterbalance this, before we filmed we decided to film at an earlier time and then later tint our video. this gave us an advantage as it meant we wouldn't have to worry about a poor image.We hope that our trailer is to a high standard considering we have got audience feedback from a number of resources
> our media class

> Facebook friends. The site facebook came in very useful as it is known for is social connection which means we can received even better and more audience feedback for example, a friend of a friend. I plan to comment on this in our evaluation as i think we have covered our audience research very well by using a range of different methods such as social networking, allowing us to achieve the best product. One of the main criticisms we got from our script was to change the vocabulary we used in our voice over. We asked the whole media class to choose between two opinions and the majority (around 8 out of 10) preferred the 2nd script and that is the one we went with. Me and Imogen then took time out of lesson to find our younger friend in Year 8 to complete the voice over in an empty classroom ( to make sure the audio wasn't muffled).However, in the end , we ended up contacting our lead actress Emma Dixon and asked her do the voice over. As we didn't want the audience to think Emma was Ruby from the myth, we editing it on Adobe Photoshop CS3 and we heightened the pitch of her voice ( as she was young when she died in our story). We tried overlaying the audio track over our trailer to see which one fitted in better and Emma's voice over was a dramatic improvement compared to our first version - as it sounded a lot of scary and dark. Another advantage of using Emma is one, that she already had experience with working with me and Imogen in this product so she knew what to expect and also she knew in detail what the story was about ( as she acted in it) - so when it came to recording the voice over she knew perfectly to speak slowly and also put on a freaky and mysteries tone of voice.

> Members of sixth form - all within our target audience range from around 15 to 21. We also asked a range of males and females to make sure our results were not biased as we want a target audience of both genders. By getting more audience feedback will ensure that our product will be finished at a higher standard because of involvement from the general public (who is the audience for our film ). Our poster is close to completion. We are spending a lot of time in making sure that our poster and magazine cover are not to similar. For example, the magazine cover is aimed more at the specific film audience and the image is often covered in many other advertisements for films and other sponsors. Whereas our poster will be simply our main image, the name and some information in small writing at the bottom of the image with information such as director, actors, times of release etc.

Our final print product and Evaluation

Now that our trailer has been uploaded (Via Imogen's blog) and our Empire cover is finished. We have now started the poster and also adding final tweeks to our trailer in school lessons. Meanwhile, out of school, i have started writing up notes and key points for our evaluation.As we will be presenting out work to the class and also conducting an interview, I have went into alot of detail to make sure i cover all of the points and possible questions we could get asked. For example, I have grouped them into categories of research, planning, shooting and editing.In my next blog i will be uploading my findings as i have also recently uploaded our video to Facebook so before we submit our final piece, we can make improvements to our work that our audience have suggested. 

Poster Print Product

As we have finished our magazine cover, we are now well on our way to completing our poster. However, we have included a lot more editing techniques such as replicating the image of Ruby to stand behind our lead actress Emma. The picture we original took of Emma did not have Imogen in the background. But thankfully, as we took so many extra shots of the setting and of Emma, we could merge to images together so we could produce the best possible image. After we copy the image of Imogen across to our photo, we decided that is looked so good that we would replicate it so it looks like there was no escape for our lead actress. To alter the image, we used photoshop pro to select Imogen was the image and delete the surrounding background so we could have layer it over the top of our original photo (which was Emma infront of the tree).

Deadline Final Magazine Cover

We have finally produced  our final Empire film Cover. Very similar to the Empire Cover advertising "The Shining" .Pictures below. After a few alterations such as removing a full stop, and increasing the size of some of the font, we finally have a finished product. We came up with the name red woods by complete cowisidence.

Both the photo of an extreme close up, the text and even advertising methods are the same. For example, both covers have at the both of the poster show a film strip of past well known horror films.Both also show a small snap shot of Halloween. Hopefully the main distinction between these two posters is that our poster is aimed at a younger audience than The Shining ( as the audience for The Shining should be 18 because of its classification. Both of these posters use an extreme close up, however, our poster is clearly showing the victim of the story, where The Shining shows Jack as the psychopath. Because of the strong connection between these two posters we hope that just from a glimpse our audience will be able to recognise is as a horror advertisement.
The two posters have similar colour schemes of red, black and white. Red - being the typical colour for horror films, representing blood and gore and black representing darkness. The white comes in very useful in our colour scheme as it is very visible against the dark backgrounds ( and that is why we used if, after researching magazine covers). The last thing we would want, is for our poster to have confusing and unclear text as people would just ignore it and not bother wasting time. We think our poster fits in very well in the horror genre because of it connotations to the audience by showing a very disturbing and frightening picture of our main actress Emma and it general overall structure and colour scheme.The close up is very effective however, it was not our original idea as we were planning to have a extreme long shot to help us show the scary environment in where our horror film was based.

"The making of" Imogen Moore and Stephanie M

The advantage of our film set is that right behind the tree, was a steep small hill.this gave us an advantage as it meant we could take our photo homever, we didnt capture the public places in the back such as the public footpath and local houses.Also,as Imogen ( or Ruby) is stood at the top of the hill which makes her looks more powerfuland dominering. Also, we were very forture as it was a very clear sky. This means that when we come round to editing, it will be more easy as there won't be any mixed colours in the sky and it would all turn out a very dark more scary colour.

This picture above was our orginal idea of that shot. We were planning for me to take the picture, Emma to be infront of the tree and Imogen behind her as Ruby ( the girl from the myth ). When we went to take the photo, it happened to be the day that our camera broke and the footage was lost. Since then, we have obtained our finally photo which only includes Emma - as we wanted all of the focus to be on Emma rather than Ruby - this is because in the trailer, Ruby is never shown however, we wanted to get Emma well established with our audience.

This picture above is the tree we used in our photo shoot, however, we decided to take the shot of the bottom of tree, As you can see the tree is quite haugthing, however, our actor could not reach that height and the roots of the tree looked a lot more scary and helps us to enclose our actor almost like she is sitting in the tree. When we first found the tree that we wanted in our shot, we had planned to have text on the bark however, when we finally got round to experimenting with font, it looks to crowded and unrealistic.

As you can see from the picture above, it clearly shows a public fence and a public path. As our trailer and magazine photo cover were taken in places, we had to make sure that both of the pictures resembled one another. To compensate this, we took an extreme close up of Emma ( our main actress) against a tree in the woods - this ensured us that we would not get any unwanted objects in our shot such as people passing through, roads or houses.

Starting our poster

We have recently started on our poster and we are trying to make it a bit scarier so it actually looks like it belongs in the “horror genre”. To do this, we have edited the photo on Photoshop by adding some a dull red layer over the top of the photo. Not only does this help to make it look scarier but it also blocks out a lot of sunlight as our photo was taken during the daytime. We have also edited some of the back ground of the picture as we wanted fore ground to attract more attention. The fore ground we have tried to draw the attention to the most is Emma ( our lead actress) and the main tree that she is hiding behind. The poster above this, is our image edited so far, considering our magazine cover is completed. In the next few lessons, we plan to edit the photo a bit more by editing the lightness of the photo and hopefully making it darker and therefore making it seem a bit more scary and after we have completed these stages we will then add the text. However, unlike the movie cover, we will include more information about the film's release - such as dates - unlike the movie cover which is mostly advertising, considering it has to advertise other stuff inside of the magazines. The poster will give us more of a chance to persuade the audience to go and see this film ( as it purely just to tempt the audience, into seeing just this one film). 

The two pictures above show our “Log Sheet” from media. However, it does not contain that much information considering we filming all of our footage on the same say with only two crew members and two actors. However, during filming, as me and Imogen were setting up our tripod, we let Liam and Emma have the camera's to film some of their own footage ( which we plan to include in the making of). Hopefully today ( or in at least the next two days ), we plan to filming our main actress Emma talking about her acting experience. I have recently contacted Emma and Imogen and we planning to shoot some more with Emma - mainly just in more detail about her experience and general questions such as

• If she believed we did our job correctly?
• Did she enjoy the experience?
• Did Liam put in as much effort as her?
• If she could do it again, what would she change?
• Do you thinking the setting and storyline was appropriate?
• Did the crew members give you an opportunity to include your own opinion?

We also plan to let Emma give me and Imogen some questions such as -

• Did the whole experience go how you predicted it?
• Did the actors do a respectable job?
• Now you have started editing, is there any think you would do differently? - such as filming some more material, filming at a different time of day, filming an alternative ending, film at a different time of day?

As one of our print products is near completion and the 2nd one is currently been worked on, I though it would be a good idea to include some more-in-depth knowledge about our filming experience and how we have progressed from AS. Also, the answers we obtain from Emma will come in very useful in our evaluation ( which is not very far off), Me and Imogen have already come up with a basic outline of answers as we know we do not have that much time left - and we still need to complete our final print product) and we want them both to be to the highest standard  we can achieve.