Magazine Cover

Four one of our ancillary tasks we had to create a film magazine cover.

We went on a photoshoot to get the best photo of Isaac as the cover. We believed he would look best on the cover as me and Jak are on the film poster. I got Isaac to look directly into the lens, this is what you typically see in these magazine covers. The background is just a stock image of clouds with some curve adjustments, which overall looks good and fits with the theme of the magazine and the film in general.

Colour-wise I decided to go with a 'dark orange' theme. This compliments the picture and the film very well as it s a dark movie. This is typically seen in Empire magazines, where the originally red title gets changed to a different colour to support the film. This also applies to the puff at the bottom about the 'Hitchcock Special!'.

One small element which may be unnoticed is that Isaac's head covers the 'P' in the Empire text. This is seen a lot in Empire magazine covers.

To appeal to all audiences we added elements of the magazine such as 'the Hitchcock special' for the older more 'critic' readers, and 'on set with ready player one, etc..'.

In the bottom right corner of the poster you can read 'issue 182'. This is not typical for Empire magazine covers, however I felt like the corner was looked empty without it. This way it challenges the conventions of the magazine cover.

The descriptions on the right hand side of the poster, talking about Decorum and how it has "More Violence, More Suspense, More Thrills". This is to draw people into reading and consequently watching our film. By adding red text it pops in the magazine.

The typeface I used on "Decorum, a Dead Man's Grasp" is a very bold one. This is to make the title stand out so people are interested in this new film.

Shot List

Jak created a shot list in which i used to help edit the trailer.

Equipment/Props/Software used

Equipment

Canon 1200D
This was the primary camera we used to film with. It was useful because it is a DSLR meaning that we can exchange different lens and focus easier.
Canon 700D

Later during the filming process, we upgraded cameras to the Canon 700D. This DSLR has a microphone jack.

RodeGO Mic

This microphone was vital to making a proffesional film trailer as the in-built microphones in cameras are not very good.

Tripod

We used a generic cheap tripod to make sure the shots were stable.

Glidecam

For some of the shots we used a glidecam. Glidecam's are really good for showing movement but with little shake or stutter.

Props

Butchers Apron

To make the trailer believable as possible we each brought props to use. Jak bought a butchers apron for him to wear as the antagonist in the trailer. We wanted a butchers apron because it fits with the horror film, similar to how you see mad scientists like this one in the 2005 film "Hostel".

Fake Blood

We didn't want to use any tomato ketchup or anything similar as we wanted to make the film trailer look as good as possible. I purchased some fake blood off amazon which worked amazing. It looked really realistic and also dried like real blood and stained like real blood which added to the overall effect.

Missing Poster

Isaac made a missing poster for himself. This was used in the film trailer to connote that people have stopped looking for him, as the poster is dated and on the floor in a puddle.

Software

Premiere Pro CC 2017
Premiere Pro is the program I used to edit the short film on. This is one of the indusrty-standard editing softwares.

Photoshop CC 2017

Photoshop was used to create all the graphics such as the film poster and the magazine cover.

Soundtracks

For our trailer the most difficult part was finding a soundtrack which worked really well in correlation with the video footage. Luckily enough I found some music which would work well in our trailer.

The first was this horror music i found off youtube. This was good because it had lots of "hits" in it which was good to sync the edits to. This was used in the Barn scene because it is really tense and dramatic.

The second piece of music we found for the soundtrack was a song I found called "The Way" by Zack Hemsey. This track was perfect for a film trailer, it is dramatic, full of "thuds" or "hits" and generally really good.

One probelm that we faced was the idea that our video was going to get a copyright strike if we uploaded our trailer, with a licensed song in it. However this was really quickly overcome as Jak emailed the artist Zack Hemesy, whom gave us permission to use the music in our trailer, as long as it is not for commercial use. Below is the said email for clarification purposes.

Finished Film Poster

After all the planning and feedback, this is the final  poster I made for the film trailer.








































Changes from first draft:

First obvious change is that the orientation has changed. After feedback which I talked about in my previous Ancillary blog post, i changed the poster to portrait. Overall I believe it looks a lot better than before.

Secondly i changed the text at the top. I changed the typeface and also changed the colour of the word "death's" to red. I think this was a good change as red is a symbolic word for death, therefore working well with the title.

I added the two apostrophes where needed in the poster as it was talked about and noticed a lot in the the feedback (see previous blog post on the poster).

Because my hand was kind of "jumping out of the scene" I edited Jak's head so it looked like it was coming out of the scene. This worked really well as it makes the picture of myself look like it was made to look like I'm reaching out of the picture, similarily to how they layer photos on film magazines such as Empire.

Finally one of the most potent changes is the fact I added another scene from our film trailer onto the poster. This is of Jak covered in blood. If you hadn't noticed I deliberately lined up the sides of Jak with the sides of my head so it looked really clean and in proportion.

Script

As part of our planning. Isaac made a script for our film Trailer. 

We all had different ideas and we went through multiple re-drafts of making scripts, however we got some feedback from a recently graduated film student who has done paid work in the film industry making scripts. This was incredibly useful as he gave us a lot of constructive criticism on our script and how to make it like a proper 'film industry standard' script. This included how to introduce a character into a scene and how you have to give a trait for the character so the actor knows how to play this character. We were taught how to write the script as if we were giving it to a group of people with no idea and for them to be able to create the film trailer we wanted.

As for the methods we used to create the Script, we decided to use a website recommended by the said film student called 'Celtex' (click this if you want to see the website). This was really useful to write a script with as not only was it easy to use, free and filled with all the tools needed, you could also forward a link to the script through an email, message etc, to other members of the group so they could link up their account and collaborate on the script.

One problem we faced was creating some effective dialogue for our script. Jak and I helped Isaac with creating some natural dialogue for the script, however we established that dialogue wasn't going to be a main emphasis in the trailer and we were going to make it as small as possible.I believe one of the drawbacks would be using heavy dialogue in the trailer as we were not professional actors, so we decided to only use dialogue when was necessary for conveying the plot in the film trailer.

Here below is some screenshots of what our script looked like:

Poster Feedback

After I finished creating the first poster, we went to get feedback on what we needed to change. Isaac posted a picture of the poster on social media to see what people thought about it.

The general response was positive, however a lot of people picked up the punctuation errors in the poster. There were no apostrophes for "Death's" and "Man's". This was slightly frustrating as the fonts I used for the title were custom and actually didn't include apostrophes , therefore I had to make them custom with Photoshop.

Secondly I went and showed some students the film poster to get some feedback. I got some really good feedback from a student who is studying graphics design at a BTEC D* grade. He said that the landscape doesn't work with the poster. Originally we thought it was good to subvert the conventions of a film poster as it is unique, however from a public designers point of view it is portrait for a reason and that reason is it generally looks better. There is less unused space on the poster which means it is easier to get drawn into the bits you want the audience to see.

Finally I got some feedback from general people I know, asking them if there was anything they see that needs changing. One of those said people said the text at the top didn't look right, it was too far to the left and generally didn't work on an angle. I was soon to change that and have to admit looking back at it now i subconsciously was feeling the same way, I knew there was something that looked off about it but it was very useful having that second opinion on the text to point out what needs fixing.