Finished Film Poster

 

Evaluation

This is my finished film poster. I have followed several film poster conventions such as structure and text. I have used a little review "the deeper they go the harder they fall!" from a made up company 'RESPONSE'. The reason I have chosen to put this on the top left is that it is in a visible place to see but doesn't interfere with the effect of the two images. The way I have placed the two image is highly influenced from the poster of The Descent. This poster was my main inspiration from a psychological drama poster as it is appealing to the audience and has relevance to the story line. I had to thoroughly edit the two pictures to get the effect I was looking for. The bottom picture, to give it a night vision effect, I had to put a green layer over the top and edit the contrast and saturation to make it look as realistic as possible. I used the magic eraser tool to get rid of some of the brickwork around the edges to make it look kind of 'ripped' and 'torn'. I then changed the opacity of the image to fade it out a bit so that its not as bright and blends in with the background and the second image. All of these little changes I have made have been influence by a variety of different posters mainly The Descent. With the second image I also used the magic eraser tool to eliminate the cracks in-between the brick work so that when I moved it onto the black background the black would be in between the bricks. I then had to put a grey scale layer over this image to get rid of the green tint of moss from inside the mine. I did this because the two green colours from each image wasn't the same and so it didn't look quite right. The grey scale completely blacks out the figure and makes it look more mysterious. All of the editing for this poster I did on Photoshop CS5.I kept the colours to a minimum as I really want the green from the main image to stand out. I put colour on the the little review section on the top left as reviews are what people look for to 'persuade' them to watch the film.

To make my title I made a new layer and entered my text. I chose between several fonts and colours and asked a few people which looked better, this font and colour had the most amount of likes and so I used this. Once I had found my text I used the 'wind' effect to scatter the edges of the letters to give it an old worn effect. I then used the 'Liquify' tool to distort the letters. The institutional information at the bottom below the image is another media convention which i have followed. I squished up the text at the bottom to mimic how other posters have displayed this information. I wasn't to sure what to write here so I wrote the release date, the production company and a list of people involved. I don't think there is much more I could have done to follow media conventions or to make my poster look more professional.

Narrative Theory

We have use verisimilitude to create a real world for the story in our trailer. The use of naturalistic props and clothing in a location which you are expected to see all of these things is how we created a naturalistic storyline for the audience to follow. Because the audience  don’t know how the story ends from watching the trailer it has not got a closed narrative structure. Our trailer does not show any evidence of a multi stran structure.  Roland barthes has 5 narrative codes, from these our trailer includes Enigma, the audience has to figure out what is going on inside the mine. Action, you see action shots of the actors on bikes performing tricks and entering the cage. Those are the only codes that we really use. From Todorov’s theorythe audience doesn’t see much of his structural idea from the trailer but the film itself would go on to meet this structure of equilibrium and disequilibrium.

Trailer Analysis: The Descent 2

Once we had got all of our footage and nearly finished editing we decided to look at more film trailers which the story lines have influenced us. We only saw this trailer after and realised how similar the techniques we have used are. Both the trailers have a short clip of an image being turned into a photograph, the only difference is that on the Descent 2 trailer the image is in black and white and ours is covered with sepia tone.
The storyline for the Descent 2 is similar to ours and is shown through a variety of camera shots and angles. At the beginning there are a few close ups of the friends faces concentrating on the sporting activity and enjoying themselves. As the trailer progresses the atmosphere changes and so do the feelings of the characters. The facial expressions change to portray fear from being inside the mine. This is a similar sequence in both trailers.
The music in this trailer progresses with more bass and louder sounds. The same things happens in our trailer. this is a media convention for thriller, horror and drama trailers. The editing and music paces speeds up towards the end of the trailer creating suspense. the reason for this is that the trailer finishes on a 'cliff hanger' to draw you in to want to watch the full film.
Overall I think that this trailer succeeds to capture attention as a psychological drama. The variety of editing techniques are definitely inspiring to our trailer and we will be trying to use some similar techniques. I think that our group will have to look into adding text into our trailer to cut in between different establishing shots at the beginning. The fades between these are really effective when the daunting music is playing and when they are in time. After realising how similar this trailer and ours i will definitely be encouraged to use some techniques from this trailer.

Editing our trailer

The first thing we had to do was to transfer our footage from the cameras onto the computer. There was a few complications with this as at first we were going edit the footage on the Macs in college. this proved a problem for other groups wanting to do this as only the images were transferring and none of the sound. We didn't want to risk this happening with ours because we have a small amount of dialogue in ours. We uploaded all the footage straight onto Isaacs apple laptop and started to put it into final cut pro.

The next step was to look back at our storyboard and put our film footage into order. We chopped and changed some of this to suit the images we had taken. Not all of the shots we planned to do were captured as they proved more difficult then we thought. We overcame this situation by taking different shots from different angles but of the same image to fill the space.

Once all the footage was in order we cut of the extra parts and then started to structure our film trailer. We wrote down where we wanted certain cuts to go at the times. Once all of the cutting had been done we just had to put in the special effects and fades. By using Final Cut Pro we were able to add in different effects like 'sepia tone' and dark/light fades between shot changes. All of the different camera angles look good especially when the actors are on the bikes. We used fast paced editing to put these different shots together as this is more of an action scene.

After the bike scene there is a short documentary moment when two of the friends pick up the camera and film themselves running away from the third friend into the mine. for this shot we edited on a frame around the camera screen and the word 'recording' with a red circle next to it just inside the lines. This shows that it is being recorded by them. The most challenging part of editing was cutting in the image of a black figure stood just inside the mine entrance with the light coming from behind. We then mixed this image with one of a 'fuzzy' TV screen. (At the end of our image editing we added the sound of the TV screen over the top of the music)

The music track over the top of the trailer is one that we found is from a royalty free music website which is copyright free and free of charge. The music track is quiet and eerie which goes perfectly well with our trailer. We would have liked to use an actual artists music track but we couldn’t because of copyright legislation.
With all of our editing almost done we have realised that we need a stronger ending to our trailer like most pyschological trailers we have researched have. We have scheduled to go back to where we filmed previously and take a last shot. We can then finish our editing and then complete our blogs and other parts of the promotional package.

Photoshop knowledge expanded

To prepare myself for editng my posters and magazine front cover I am practising using photoshop by editing different photos and using a range of tutorials from YouTube which I have found help me.

(Left) Is an image I found on google (Right) is the image I edited using Photoshop CS5.

The video below is the one I used to help me.

Below (Left) is another image I found on the internet of a model. I have changed the colour of her and and eyes, i have also enhanced her lips and put a light pink colour over the top. I have given her more of a tan. I picked green eyes as i think it looks completely different from the original image I used.