Poster Research

           

I have decided that I shall be creating a teaser poster for my film. Teaser posters are generally simpler than theatrical posters and are used to spark an initial interest in the film. I shall be using a selection of commonly used conventions for teaser film posters, in the poster that I am creating. Such conventions are visible in the images above.

Trailer First Version Feedback

After completing the first version of my film trailer I decided to ask a selection of people for their feedback on it. I did this so as to discover what people thought of it and to identify any areas that people felt I could improve on. I obtained this feedback by messaging a number of people I knew via the social network ‘Facebook’. I sent the following message to people:

The feedback that I got was as follows:

“I like the look of your trailer so far. The locations and acting that you used were very nice. However I feel that it could be made better if the audio were to be changed”
– James Smith

“I didn’t like it because I’m not into that genre of movies. The camera work was decent though.”
– Amy Jones

“Lovely trailer, but I didn’t really understand what was going on.”
– Luke Cameron

“Ha, it’s a lot better than my trailer. Really decent piece of work, the narrative is quite vague however and the sound effects could have been improved.”
– Stanley Mills

To conclude, the responses of people seemed to be mostly positive. However they have identified some of the key areas of improvement that could be made. I had already considered changing the majority of the negative things mentions, but it was a positive experience hearing that other people felt that they needed to be changed as well.

Poster Variations

Magazine Cover Feedback

After creating a version of my magazine cover that I was happy with, I decided to ask a set of people for their opinions on it. I chose to do this as I felt that it would give me an insight into what magazine’s readers would think of the cover, as well as allowing me to identify possible areas of improvement.

The first person that I decided to ask for feedback was Micah Hills, a student currently studying media. He granted me permission to film him giving a small overview of the magazine as well as giving his suggestions on how it could be improved.

The second person that I asked for feedback was Christian Turner. He opted for giving the feedback in a written format rather than being filmed. His feedback is as follows:

“I feel that this is a very strong magazine cover design. It captures the style and conventions of a Little White Lies magazine perfectly. I honestly can’t think of any way in which you could improve it.”

The third and final student that I asked for feedback was Joseph Gower. His feedback was as follows:

“You’ve designed the main image very well. I really like the splatter effects that you’ve used in the background. Altogether the design of the magazine is really good. As for improvements, I noticed that there wasn’t an issue number displayed on your cover. I don’t think this would be a major issue but I feel that it could be better if you added one. Also you may want to experiment with the colours of the main image and the background.”

In conclusion, from the feedback it was clear that I needed to add an issue number to my cover. In addition to this I shall take into account their opinions about the background colour and experiment with a few different colours and styles.

Magazine Cover Variations

Props

The genre of our film was action and crime. These types of movies generally contain a lot of props and outfits for their characters. However since my group was going for a realistic, small scale production about a thug that is out for vengeance after his friends money was stolen, we did not require a massive amount of props. The props that we ended up using were a rounders bat; a bike; a poker table and cards; a bag; a list of names and outfits for Jason Dyer and Sam Williams.

The rounders bat was used as the primary weapon of Jason Dyer as he enjoys fighting with blunt weapons. In addition to this guns are illegal and very hard for people to obtain in the UK, therefore it is unlikely that Jason Dyer would have been in possession of one.

The bicycle was used as a means of transport of Rory Macbride. In addition to providing him with transport it was used to subconsciously remind the audiences that his money had been stolen and he was therefore unable to afford to use his car.

The poker table and cards were used so as to make the poker scene believable. We chose to use poker as the character’s game of choice since it is extremely well known and is often used for gambling. In addition to this, there are similar gambling scenes in many other crime related movies.

The bag that Rory Macbride used was to carry his possessions. It was also used as a reminder that he had lost everything and now carries everything he owns with him.

The list of names was used to show the targets of Jason Dyer. The title of the film relates to this list as it plays a major part in the movie. In the trailer, Jason Dyer shall be shown crossing names of the list thus symbolising that he has eliminated his targets.

We decided that some of the characters needed unique clothing. We therefore decided to give Sam Williams a leather jacket and Jason Dyer his iconic clothing. These can be considered props as the actors were required to wear them in the majority of the footage.

Exploring Different Types Of Videos

Exploring Different Types Of Videos from Joseph Dunkerley

Photography Session

One of the activities that we decided to do for our project was a photography session. This session was done because be required a set of different pictures for usage in our film posters and magazine covers. We had to take pictures of the models in a range of different poses so that we would have enough images to each be able to use a different one for our projects. In addition to this, taking a lot of photos would give us a greater selection of images to choose from. The more photos there were to choose from, the greater the chances of us producing a high quality product were.

In the photography session we used two separate models, Tom Nelson and Joseph Inns. These were the two main characters in the film trailer and were therefore the most appropriate people to use. We had a limited amount of resources and space to use for this photoshoot as we decided to do it at school. The area in which we did this was an empty classroom. We cleared a section of the classroom and covered a window with a white sheet. This was done so as to provide us with a blank background. A blank background would allow us to easily be able to replace it with other graphics such as picture of the locations that we filmed at. The window allowed a nice amount of natural lighting into the room, as well as this we had a large bright light that we borrowed from the school’s photography department.

Below is an image of the set up that we used and a diagram of how it was put together:

Camera Technique Research

In preparation for the task of creating a film trailer I decided to investigate and compare how three different types of videos filmed their products. For this I compared a film trailer, television advert for a product and a music video to each other and reviewed a variety of their different aspects. I chose to focus on their movement; angles and shots; focus; amount of cameras used and their formats. I believe that doing this has given me a more advanced idea of how I could shoot my own film trailer as well as potentially using codes and conventions from other types of videos.

The three videos I compared were:

The Guardians of the Galaxy trailer:

The Cadburys Gorilla Advert:

Feed Me & Crystal Fighters - Love Is All I Got music video:

Camera Techniques	Film: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) - Trailer	Advert: Cadburys Gorilla Advert (2007)	Music Video: Feed Me & Crystal Fighters – Love Is All I Got (2012)
Movement	As this is a full-length action movie the majority of camera movements are used (panning, crabbing, tracking, peds, tilting and zoom). There is a contrast between the smooth and relatively slow motion of the shots that do not contain action scenes and the action scenes. The action scenes use very fast movement and a mixture of handheld cameras and cameras which that are not. There is significantly more variety of movements shown in this movie and trailer then there is in the Cadburys advert and the Love Is All I Got music video.	The advert primarily uses the dolly camera method as well as a range of panning and tracking. The movement starts off slow at the start because the music is calm. However the motion speeds cut dramatically when the drum solo occurs and the pacing of the music increases. In addition to this the camera work is rather shaky, therefore it may have been recorded via a handheld method. The movement in the advert is far less varied than the movement shown in the guardians of the galaxy trailer and the music video. However this is intentional and gives a more realistic and ‘homemade’ feel to it.	The music video primarily makes use of tracking and zooming. The motion is very smooth and it does not appear that the camera is a handheld one. There are a large amount of movement types such as panning, crabbing, tracking, zooming and tilting used in this video. It appears to be of a high quality but is clearly less professional then the movement shown in the guardians of the galaxy trailer. However it makes better use of the movement then the Cadburys advert does.
Angles and Shots	The trailer shows a montage of different angles and shots. However the most used type shot appeared to be a medium close up taken at eye level. Due to the length of the full movie it is very likely to include a majority of the possible angles and shots. In the trailer I noticed low angles, high angles, eye-level shots, bird’s eye views and examples of long shots, medium shots and close ups.	At the beginning of the video, close ups and medium close ups are primarily used. This is done so as to hide the drum kit from view. These shots range from low angles to high angles and eye-level shots. When the drum solo begins, medium and medium long shots shots are used in addition to a selection of close up cuts.	This music video used a range of angles and shots. It is able to explore them to a greater degree than the Cadburys advert as it does not limit itself to using a single camera and is set in a more open location then it.
Focus	A selection of different focuses are used (both shallow depth of fields and deep depths of field).	A shallow depth of field is used for the close up scenes of the gorilla. However, when it zooms out to reveal the drum kit it is changed to a deep depth of field thus showing everything in the scene.	Both shallow and deep depths of field are used in the music video.
Multiple Cameras	Since this is a trailer for a highly expensive movie many cameras have been used. There any many instances in which these are displayed. Multiple cameras are used to display a variety of different angles and movement times throughout the scenes. It makes best use of the multiple cameras and does it with a relative amount of subtlety.	The scene appears to have only been shot with one camera that pans around the area. I am led to believe this because the area appears to be too small to use multiple cameras without capturing the other cameras in the shot. I believe that they would have simply taken multiple takes so as to allow for the cuts. A similar method was used in the new movie ’12 Years a Slave’.	I believe that there were multiple cameras used for this music video as there are certain scenes such as the party scene in which the switch between the locations is seamless. Also many cuts are used.
Format (what camera may have been used)	The movie is still to be released, it had a large budget and would have therefore used top quality equipment such as the Sony PXW-Z100. It is the production with the largest budget and therefore would have been able to afford more expensive gear than the Cadburys advert and music video.	Since it is an advert for a well-known company I would think that an expensive camera was used. A camera they could have used is the Sony PMW-500. This is because it is a highly expensive camera that is used for professional situations and was available in 2007, when the advert was produced.	The music video is filmed exceptionally well. However I do not believe that the equipment available wouldn’t have been as expensive as that used in the Cadburys advert or the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer. I am led to believe that they would have used a medium priced video camera such as the Panasonic HDC-MDH1 PAL Camcorder due to budget restrictions.

Film Script

Due to the nature of our film we opted for the usage of narration entirely instead of using character dialogue within the actual video footage. One of the major positive aspects of this was that it allowed us to get a crisper and nicer sounding set of audio as we were able to use microphones instead of talking straight into the video camera. The sound was therefore vastly improved as it eliminated most of the background noise that we would have otherwise had to face.


Script:


Rory Macbride (Intro) - I was involved with some bad people. And one game, a fixed game, was where it all went downhill.

Rory Macbride - Sometimes it just takes a few phone calls and all your problems are gone, just like that.

Jason Dyer - I don’t care who they are or where they are. You give me their locations and I’ll find them.

Rory Macbride - So I wrote a list and gave it to the only person I knew who could deal with the problem. Jason Dyer!

Jason Dyer (Credits) - The world’s a dangerous place to live in, you’ve got to constantly be looking over your shoulder.

Below you can listen to the script being read by computer generated voices:

 Here is a picture of what the script looked like when it was printed off. We used this sheet for reference when the lines were being recorded.

Below is an image of Joseph Inns reading through the script. He was one of the main voice talents in our trailer.

Font Selection

One of the main designing aspects of the project was deciding which font should be used for the logo of the film. The font would go on to be used in the poster, film trailer and possibly even the magazine cover. To decide what font was to be chosen I selected ten different fonts that would be appropriate. I then showed these fonts to the various group members to get their opinions on them. We after the discussion we decided to choose the font titled ‘Bank Gothic’. This font was selected primarily because it was smart and seemed as though it would fit nicely onto a range of different promotional film products. In addition to this it was similar to fonts from other successful action and crime movies such as Hot Fuzz, Django unchained, the Bourne identity and In Time. The other fonts in the list had various undesirable qualities. Font 2 seemed too tribal; fonts 6 and 7 portrait the wrong message as they didn’t seem serious enough and font 8 and 9 were too difficult to read. Fonts 3, 4, 5 and 10 were all good enough to be chosen but font 1 was the favourite of all the members of our group.

Magazine Cover Inspiration

One of the tasks of creating a promotional package for a new film was to create a front cover for a film magazine. To achieve this I had to look at a selection of different film magazines as that I would be able to use an existing magazine as the basis for my work and to make use of their codes and conventions. I decided to look at ‘Empire’, ‘Total Film’ and ‘Little White Lies’ for this. Below are a selection of different film magazine covers and my opinions on them:

This is the first magazine cover that I looked at. I liked the strong logo that ‘Empire’ used and their decision to have text both in front and behind their model (which is Wolverine). It seems as though the style would be easy to replicate due to the simplicity of the image and the masses of basic text that are present. Unfortunately I did not like their decision to have such a large amount of text present on their front cover and have therefore decided to use a different magazine for my magazine cover.

The second magazine cover that I looked at was one for ‘Total Film’. This was possibly my least favorite design due to the amount of text and images that cluttered the front page. On a positive note, it contained most of the conventions of a standard magazine cover. However I think that the style would be very difficult to replicate and would end up looking dreadful if I were to base my magazine cover on this type of design. In addition to this, it would be hard to find images for other films such as the ones that they are promoting on this issue of the magazine.

The third magazine cover that I looked at was one for ‘Little White Lies’. This magazine defies most conventions of common film magazine via its choice to use only their logo, main image, title and occasionally a small amount of additional cover lines. This results in a very simplistic style of magazine cover. This simplicity would make it very easy to replicate the style of a ‘Little White Lies’ magazine cover. However their covers are highly stylised, this would add difficulty to creating a magazine cover of this type but at the same time would give me a high level of creative freedom.

This next magazine cover is another from ‘Little White Lies’. Unlike the previous cover it has a set of cover lines. In addition to this it had a different art style to the previous magazine.

This version of ‘Little White Lies’ features a different logo to the other copies. The logo’s text takes up more space and it looks a lot stronger than the other type of logo that they use.

This copy of ‘Little White Lies’ shows yet another art style that they used.

In conclusion, I have decided that I shall be creating a magazine cover for a ‘Little White Lies’ magazine. I liked their cover design the most due to its simplicity, stylized graphics and the amount of creative freedom that I would be allowed if chose to design a cover for their magazine.

Poster Inspiration

In preparation for the creation of my film poster I decided to take a look at a range of existing film posters. This was done so as to allow me to see a range of different types of posters so as to inspire me and to give me an understanding of the general conventions of a movie poster.

1: The Dark Knight:

The first poster was for the Dark Knight. This is a very basic poster and only contains a limited amount of text due to the focus on the main image and the logo of Batman. I am unlikely to have such a small model for my main character as I do not feel that I have a background strong enough to carry the image, as is the case in this poster. One of the other interesting features of this poster was the selection of credits at the bottom. These are included because it is a theatrical poster; I shall not be including these in my poster as I intend to create a teaser poster.

2: Rise Of The Guardians:

This is a teaser poster for Rise of The Guardians. It has large bold writing and the primary focus is on the character Jack Frost. To emphasise his importance they have used a simple background so that the attention shall be drawn to the character. At the top of the poster is a simple statement which says “Jack Frost is more than a myth”, this helps with drawing attention to the film and provides a mild insight into what it is about.

3: Orphan:

This teaser poster for Orphan features a strong image of a child staring directly towards the camera. The expression of the character hints that the character is sinister. This is then supported by the line “There’s something wrong with Esther” thus telling audiences that it is indeed a horror movie. The message is supported by the dull background of the poster.

4: Drive

This theatrical poster for drive is simple yet very effective. The character’s thuggish appearance symbolizes the genre of the film and the city setting tells the audiences what sort of location it is primarily set in. There is an emphasis on the name of the primary actor ‘Ryan Gosling’ thus attracting people that are fans of the actor. The positive message at the top of the page is used to spark an interest with people as it certifies that other people consider it to be a good movie.

Final Pieces

Film Trailer:

Film Poster:

Magazine Cover:

Final Film Poster

Film Poster Initial Variations

Here are two initial variations I did of my film poster:

Version 1:

This first version looks very nice, but it has a lot of blank space. To improve this I could either add text to the top of the image or change the background of the poster.

Version 2:

This second version of the poster didn't come out very well. The main issue that I had was cropping the white background from the image. I accidentally did it poorly and therefore the character has sections of his face and body missing. I shall need to change this if I am to improve it or even have it qualify as a proper film poster.

Final Trailer

Film Merchandise

The majority of films these days tend to have a variety of merchandise associated with them. This merchandise can include a large range of different things such as clothing, toys, cups, posters and more. I believe that clothing would be the primary piece of merchandise that would be associated with Dyers List if it were a real film. Therefore I created a mock-up of a possible shirt design for the film, using a design that my fellow group member Joseph Inns created and the website shirtmockup.com. Most of the merchandise associated with the film would contain either Jason Dyer or Rory Macbride as they are the two primary characters in the film.

Final Magazine Cover

This is the final version of my magazine cover. The magazine that I chose to use for my work was ‘Little White Lies’. I believe that I was able to successfully capture the nature of the magazine by following its codes and conventions. I was able to make a number of improvements to my work due to peoples feedback and my own personal research.

Magazine Cover First Draft

This is the first draft of my magazine cover. I have chosen Little White Lies as the magazine that the film is to feature on. I chose Little White Lies as their covers are generally simplistic, yet highly stylised. I felt that this would allow me far more creative freedom than other magazines such as Empire and Total Film would have. In addition to this I felt I would be able to focus far more so on the promotional image since I would not need to worry about the content of the text included on the page.

Unfortunately I felt that I did an extremely bad job on the image, even for a first draft. I feel that my main issue was attempting to simply add filters and effects to a photograph rather than drawing a picture of the main character (the standard convention of the magazine). The image of the model was poorly cut out and clashed with the background, thus giving the impression that it was done by an artist that had very little experience. I am therefore very unhappy with the design and plan on redoing it completely.

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

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

Gaining feedback from my audiences was incredibly useful. It gave me an insight into the opinions of my target market. In addition to this, by interacting with people I was able to find ways of improving my media that I would have otherwise missed. Overall, the feedback that I received allowed me to create better media products.

I primarily asked feedback from people in my target audience, but was also able to gain feedback from a selection of other people as well. Fortunately since the film was an action/crime/thriller with an age rating of 15, the target audience was around the same sort of age that my group members and I are. This made it easier to gain audience feedback since with all had a large range of contacts which fitted the specifications of our intended target market.

I was able to get the feedback via the use of a number of different people including:

My Media Studies Teacher – The teacher that I had for the subject had a vast amount of experience in media and was therefore able to give me a fantastic amount of feedback. His feedback included telling me which areas of my products I had done well on and identifying the weaker areas of the practical pieces. However since he was the teacher the majority of his answers were vague in the sense that he never told me exactly what to do and would therefore not have a large impact on the project.

Media Studies Students – Discussing my ideas and displaying my creative pieces of work to the other students in my class was very useful. Since they were studying the same course and therefore doing similar tasks to me, I was able to gain more detailed feedback from these students than most other people. In addition to this, they could identify problematic areas and give me guidance on how to better fit the codes and conventions as well as producing a nicer looking piece of work. I was able to give these people feedback on their own work as well as simply getting feedback from them for my work thus making the task beneficial to both sides.

Friends – Friends were one of the major sources of audience feedback that I used. They were who I was in contact with the most and therefore were the most convenient people to use for the task. The only negative factor about asking my friends for feedback was that they had a limited amount of knowledge in the subject and were therefore unable to give as valuable feedback as the teacher of the media studies class and the media studies students. However they were still able to provide important feedback and give interesting new opinions on certain products.

Assorted Others – Throughout the course I gained feedback from a number of other people as well. These primarily included family members and random students from my school (not studying media studies). I was able to get useful feedback from these people, but it wasn't as convenient or as insightful as the feedback I was able to get from other people.

I collected the data via a number of different sources including:

Verbal contact – This was my primary source of feedback in this project. All that this method involved was me asking somebody for feedback and then simply writing down their responses. Since I am still attending school at the moment, I had a large amount of contact with people and was therefore able to get a lot of feedback.

Social networking – Another of the methods I used was messaging people via social networks (mostly Facebook). This was convenient as it allowed me to contact a large amount of people instantly and gave me people’s responses in a written format that I could simply copy into a Microsoft Word document and save, thus cutting out the need for me to personally write anything down.

Video recording – One of the methods that I attempted was interviewing people and recording their responses. It was a good idea and was easy to carry out for the most part. Unfortunately though, many people were reluctant to be filmed and therefore I ended up with a limited amount of feedback in video format.

Surveys – A different method of capturing information was using surveys. I primarily used the website Surveymonkey.com to do this. It was highly useful as it automatically totaled the scores that were received, I was then able to go on and create a number of graphs using this information. The only setback was that setting up the survey and sending it out to people took a fair amount of time and effort.

Overall the audience feedback taught me a lot as it allowed me to identify errors, make improvements and tailor my products to better suit the targeted audiences thus making my work significantly better. I used audience feedback significantly more so than I had done last year in my media studies coursework since I had more tasks to complete and I was now more aware of the advantages of collecting feedback from people.

Question 2: How Effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Overall I feel that the combination of my main product (the movie trailer) and ancillary texts was very effective. The teaser film poster that I created would have created an initial interest in the film, which would have then been reinforced by the magazine cover. Out of the two ancillary texts I believe that the magazine cover was the strongest. However both the film poster and the magazine cover share a number of common features as well as strongly linking to the main product. I believe that it is obvious that the magazine cover and film poster are being used to successfully advertise the same film as the one that the main task is about, therefore I would consider them to be a success. There are a number of ways in which each task is combined to the main product. To fully understand this, one must consider both ancillary texts separately.

Film Poster:

The film poster shares a number of common features with the film trailer. The most obvious of these shared elements is the heavy focus of the main character, Jason Dyer. Both the main task and the poster display him as a violent character that is not to be messed with. In the trailer this is shown through the violent actions of the character, however since the poster is a static image it had to use another method to show this. The poster displays the characters violent tendencies via the menacing, serious expression on the main characters face. In addition to this, the violence is symbolized by the blood splatters that can be seen both on the title and in the background of the poster. Other elements of the trailer are also present in the poster including the names of the actors, the production studio’s name, the film’s website and distribution studio (Lionsgate). The most obvious linkage to the trailer is the name of the movie ‘Dyers List’ and that it uses the same font as the trailer did.

Magazine Cover:

Since the magazine cover was for a ‘Little White Lies’ magazine I had to give it a unique visual style. However there is still a major link between the magazine cover, film poster and film trailer. The magazine cover takes the same approach as the poster by using an image of only the main character from the film. This is a massively effective way of combing the tasks together as the character is recognizable and is the main focus in each different product. The magazine cover also links to the other tasks by displaying the title ‘Dyers List’. It is the same title as the other two products use, but uses a different font. The different font was used to make it fit the conventions of the ‘Little White Lies’ magazine. However the different font has a sinister feel to it and can easily be linked to the film’s genre (crime/action/thriller). The dark and violent nature of the film is also displayed via the use of a grey background and splatters behind the main character.