Radio Trailer Research

Radio trailers for films these days are hard to come by; as technology becomes evermore popular, advertising flocks to the internet and spreads across the entire web in a bid to garner a huge audience and create unstoppable word of mouth. Go back a few decades however to 1975 and you might have heard the radio spots for 'Death Race 2000'. Go back even further and you might have heard radio spots for James Bond's 'Thunderball' (both seen below). As you can tell, the method of advertising has changed greatly and even the way they describe the film would now be considered massively outdated and cheesy.

 

The third trailer down promoting the film 'Alien' is a lot more appropriate; it creates tension with little dialogue and a suspenseful string section mixed with odd sound effects. There is very little narration, just the tagline of the film - "In space, no one can hear you scream", the distributor, certificate and title. All said in under 10 seconds. 

I will use this kind of approach when editing together our films radio spot to create a tense atmosphere with minimal narration.

First draft feedback - Nightmares.

We received some very good feedback from our first draft of the film which we will be taking into consideration for the very final version. This version is not complete missing some obvious things such as music and transitions and we expected that people would pick up on these. This is the feedback we received:

I also asked a filmmaker from youtube what he though of it and although he didn't give any critiques he picked up on some of the good bits which we took into consideration and kept.

We also asked our peers and our teacher and got mostly the same feedback, mainly positive with the exceptions of the obvious things such as making the transitions a lot smoother and to add the final pieces of music needed. 

First Draft, Five Minute Film - Nightmares

This is the first draft of our five minute, short film - Nightmares.

This version of the film tells the complete story, but there are some major changes we need to make in terms of editing. We need to work on smoothing out the transitions between each sequence (day), and feedback from the viewers offer other suggested changed also:

We'll keep the comments in mind, particularly those regarding the use of a colour corrector and making the transition between the days smoother and more clear.

We have received a lot of positive feedback regarding the film however, from other members of the class and other Media classes alike, a lot of praise about the film has also come from tutors at the college.

Composing for Film

Over the past years i've become an avid composer in both my spare time and work; Doing so has given me confidence to write my own music for both my AS and A2 Media films.

Having such software as Logic Pro and a number of instrument libraries from EastWest (http://www.soundsonline.com/) means I can dive straight into composing at home between the gaps of editing the film.

With Logic, I can open part of the film to play alongside my composition, giving me greater accuracy with the timing of the film in coordination with the score.

The Breakfast Scene, scored using EWQL Symphonic Orchestra in Logic

Below is a short video of my setup at home for composing music, along with a draft composition for 'the breakfast scene'.

Getting more used to the steadicam!

The first time I used the steadicam I found it pretty difficult; even more so on our first day of filming considering I was battling some pretty gusty winds! Here's a compilation of some of the first steadicam shots of filming day one -

Most of the steadicam shots from day one are pretty much unsalvageable, we did get some better results from filming day 2 though, but in the end I think we'll opt to use the alternative tripod shots of the sequence, as featured in the end of the following video -

In regards to the progression of the film, we only have one day left of shooting which will take place this wednesday. If all goes to plan, filming should be complete and editing can go into full swing! After having a quick glance through all of our footage, it doesn't look likely that we'll be needing to do any reshoots.

Poster Design

Considering that all the filming is complete and editing is well underway, I started designing a poster for the film based on my inspirations and research from an earlier post. I hadn't used Photoshop in a while but jumped straight in with my graphics tablet and got to work. For me, the film seems like one of its key aspects is the use of light and how it portrays Ivy's emotions and so really wanted to capture and incorporate that feeling into the poster, which meant using colourfully manipulated images alongside the silhouette of Ivy I had in mind.

I'm really pleased with how this turned out, I envisaged just Ivy in the poster with light beaming behind her, but as I continued making the poster I realised how empty it might turn out; below is an example of the above poster without the additional images.

In some ways, it's more effective than the above poster because of the 'dreamy' light beaming from the right, but I think the use of colour really gives the other poster the edge.

I will probably get feedback from other members of my class regarding which poster is more suitable!

The posters were created using Adobe Photoshop and a Wacom Intuos 3 Graphics Tablet. The silhouette of Ivy is a combination of both a digitally painted and real image. The 'dreamy' beaming colour was digitally painted (whilst using a lot of 'smudge'!) to intensify the emotions of Ivy.

The final poser that we will use to advertise the film will be the first picture posted above.

Poster design 2

Shot of someone moving on in 'Being Human'

As I did not have access to Photoshop at home and did not know how to achieve the look for my poster I wanted, through the college computers I decided that designing my own poster completely would be a good option. I chose to create an image of the protagonist (Ivy) stood in a doorway that was glowing with light. I did this because of the connotations and links with passing and moving on to the other side. I also chose to use a lot of bright colours to mirror the style of lighting we used within our film whenever Ivy was having a 'nightmare'. I chose the silouhette shot as my basis because I felt it was a very iconic and recognisable within the film, I also felt that having the girl stood in the centre of the image, facing the light was a way to hint that she would face death. The idea of the door was actually took from the series 'Being Human' where when a character dies and is ready to move on, a door appears that shines a bright light through. They would then proceed to go through the door. I felt that by doing this it would also misleed the intended audience a bit, so that when they came to watch the film they wouldn't have everything already figured out.
After drawing out the concept for the poster, I painted it using water colours and then scanned it into my computer. Then in photoshop adjusted the hue and saturation as well as other small adjustments needed. I am quite pleased with the final design and because of the limitations I had, I think it turned out better than expected.

Poster Research & Inspiration

A poster can say a lot about its respective product; genre (and therefore potential audience), lead characters and possibly even plot. Smaller details such as the director, release date and tag lines are often included also. Much like film, posters have changed enormously since decades ago; before the 90's, illustrations were much more common than photographs; think the original iconic posters of Star Wars: A New Hope, they don't make them like they used to!

Much like its film counterpart, posters of today are riddled with special effects and CGI, all to attract a potential audience.





Considering the tone of our film and use of lighting, I'd expect the finished poster to be dark, and maybe even show the lead character as a silhouette with subtle lighting across her face; similar to the below examples.

The 'V for Vendetta' poster in particular is a good example of the kind of composition I'm aiming toward.

After a lengthy search of the internet I finally found the industry standard font used at the bottom of film posters detailing the distribution/production company, director, composer and many more. The font is called SteelTongs and after a quick download they were ready to use in word to incorporate into our future poster!

Interacting with our actors

Our Actors