Film Trailer: Final

Magazine Cover: Final

Film Poster: Final

Evaluation 4

Evaluation question 4 from Millie Turner

Evaluation 3

Evaluation 3 from Millie Turner

Evaluation 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

As recognised by participants of my questionnaires, my main product and ancillary texts are effectively combined by using the primary characters from my film trailer as the primary images for both my Magazine Cover and Film Poster. This may seem like an obvious and trivial link, however, Ella and I ensured we used many shots in the trailer of the central protagonist and her love interest together, to embed the character duo in our audiences minds. This would subsequently increase synergy between my trailer and ancillary texts by using the same prevalent duo from my main product, in my ancillary texts.

The combination of my film trailer and film poster is effective as both follow the codes and conventions of real life media texts and products of Social Realist Dramas. For example, my trailer explores real social issues and the primary image in my film trailer is black and white, which adheres to the convention of Social Realist Drama posters having muted colours and tones, like 'Trainspotting'.

Both ancillary texts and film trailer illustrate the title in the same universal font. This increases synergy across my products and means that the title/font is eventually associated with my film, like the famous 'Star Wars' font. This means that my products combine effectively as there are subtle shared links between them.

Evaluation 1

Evaluation q 1 from Millie Turner

Film Trailer: Risk Assessment

Before we started filming and were looking for actors, Ella and I decided to create a poster that we would place around our school. The purpose of which was to encourage young actors to step forward and be apart of our project. However, within the poster I had to specify exactly what we wanted from the actors and had to ensure them that they would not be placed in positions of discomfort regarding our plotline. Our actors feeling uncomfortable with what they were doing would have not only been a performance hazard but also unethical.

While filming the show shown below, of the pair on the bed, I had to stand on top of a chair in order to get the high angle shot Ella and I wished to achieve. This was potentially hazardous as the chair wasn't particularly sturdy and also, dropping the camera from that height would have surely damaged it. To ensure I didn't fall, Ella stood by me, holding both the chair and me in order to keep me steady and aid my safety. We also placed some cushions on the floor to ensure that, in the unlikely chance that I did drop the camera, it didn't break.

There are several shots from the interior and exterior of my car. While in the car, I ensured that everyone was wearing seatbelts in order to abide by correct car safety. Ella filmed while I drove around a small housing estate in the village where Ella lives. One of the car shots involves Ella filming out of the rear view window. This partially obstructed the rear window for me while driving, however, due to this being unsafe for prolonged time or distance, we ensured that the filming of the shot was completed quickly meanwhile I only drove the car a few feet forwards.

There are also several shots of the two female actors in a shower. The actors obviously weren't actually naked, however they wore strapless tops which with careful camera positioning and editing, made it appear as though they were. Again, to prevent discomfort and also due to convenience due to the time we had to film these particular shots, the shower wasn't actually on. This also prevented the hazard of the actors slipping over in the shower, which could have hurt them.

Magazine Cover: Title Font

There were several fonts I found on dafont.com which I thought would be effective fonts for my magazines title. However, I chose 3 favourites and then asked my target audience which font they preferred.

My 3 Favourites:

1. Urban Jungle

I liked Urban Jungle because it linked well with the urban and grunge theme that I wanted to replicate in my cover as I believe it not only links to my magazine but also the social realist film my magazine cover will be promoting.

2. Blackout Sunrise

Blackout Sunrise fits in with the conventions of magazine title fonts as it is capitalised and bold. I was really fond of the boldness and also the fact that I could colour the font whatever colour I wanted to with ease, on photoshop.

3. CocoBiker
The quirky shapes that the font consists of links well with my magazines name 'MaveriK' which is derived from the word 'maverick' meaning, nonconformist and hen used as an adjective, has synonyms of unusual and irregular. The irregular style of the font not only links well with the titles connotations but is also very eye-catching despite it not being as bold as the previous 2 fonts.

After choosing 3 favourite fonts, I asked my target audience to choose their favourite. 'Urban Jungle' was the least popular because although it did have effective connotations, it simply wasn't as favoured as the opposing fonts. 'CocoBiker' was the second favourite font because although it was eye-catching and visually appealing, it wasn't as clear and bold as 'Blackout Sunrise'. 'Blackout Sunrise' was the most popular with my target audience and myself, it is both bold and eye-catching and the style means that it is easy to manipulate how I wish in photoshop.

Magazine Cover: Final Title Name

I asked multiple members of my target audience which of the Magazine Title Names they preferred. 'The Jukebox' was the least popular as my audience agreed that the name had musical connotations which is not the form of media I wanted my magazine to specialise in. 'Ink' was second due to my audience being really attracted to the draft title I illustrated in a previous post titled: 'Magazine Cover: Title Name'. However, it was the most popular due to its connotations of tattooing. 'MaveriK' was the most popular with my target audience due to it lacking connotations that didn't fit with my magazines genre: Film magazine. 'MaveriK' has connotations that link with my target audience and the word is also linguistically similar to 'movie' which will ultimately unify all aspect of my magazine.

Magazine Cover: Title Name

Before creating my magazine cover, I began to brainstorm names of which my magazine could be called as I believe the title can set the tone for the magazines cover. I came up with three favourites, and the reasons behind them are as follows:

1. The Jukebox

I liked the idea of the vintage music machine as it has vintage and indie connotations which suit the independent style I'm trying to achieve. The bright colours that real Jukeboxes use to draw attention to themselves can be replicated on my cover which will be eye-catching to my audience. One negative aspect of the name is that it has connotations that are inherently musical, which is an aspect of media, however, I want my magazine cover to be focalised around the idea of film, although, other independent film magazines like INDIE Magazine (http://indie-mag.com/) are centred around many forms of media ranging from film to music to photography.

2. MaveriK
The name is derived from the word 'maverick' which defined as an unorthodox and independent minded person which are characteristics of my target audience. I decided to use a play on words to make the word my own and to appeal to my target audience who's ages range from 16-25. Capitalising the M and the K mean that, as my magazine becomes more well established, I can abbreviate it and use the initials 'MK' which I think would be very effective if the magazine were to expand and would also increase its recognisability.

3. Ink

There is already an existing tattoo magazine named 'Inked', and so this would make me reluctant to name my magazine such a similar name, however I think the connotations that come with 'Ink' would be appealing to my target audience. I would also find it interesting to incorporate the imagery of octopi's tentacles on the cover. An idea I already have would be to have an octopus tentacle wrapped around the title, as roughly illustrated below. The connotations of 'Ink' that I think would appeal to my target audience are the connotations of permanence, the idea of leaving your mark which I believe resonates with many young people today and it also has connotations of edginess and grunge which would be an effective quality to have in an independent magazine.

The other names I brainstormed:

- Ignite
- The Collective
- Solo
- The Guild
- The Lavalier
- The Catalyst

Film Poster: Draft 1

I created a draft film poster which enabled me to visualise what I wanted my final film poster to look like. Despite the essentials being the same, PicsArt, the app I used to create my draft poster, and Photoshop, which I will be using to create my final poster, are very different. There is clear difference in quality, however, I will spend more time creating my final piece and so that is to be expected.

The primary image was an image I originally screenshot from my film trailer of my central protagonist. I included a secondary image that I blended into the poster by both decreasing the secondary images opacity and blending the picture using the 'Multiply' option. Using the 'Multiply' blend meant that the secondary image would adopt the same base colour as the rest of the poster, ultimately promoting colour coordination. I used the credits I created for my film trailer and used the 'Lighten' blend to get rid of the black background, replacing it with the grey I used for my poster. I used the colour grey as my posters background colour because when looking at Social Realist posters, they use muted colours. I wanted to conform to this convention by using a grey background instead of a black or white background because I felt that black didn't fit with my trailers themes, and white was too bright. I used a dark red which has connotations of love and also colour coordinates with my central protagonists red vest.

On my final poster I wish to improve the primary image by adding some dimension to it, the poster appeared very amateur and 2D which it evidently was, however I feel that adding some depth to the image, by perhaps creating a shadow behind it, will benefit the poster a lot. The credits also took up too much space, and so this is also something I'll alter in my final piece.

Film Poster: Research

Poster research from Millie Turner

Film Poster: Primary Image Airbrushing.

After taking multiple shots of my central protagonist and her love interest, I chose this image to be the primary image for my Film Poster. Like the majority of images used to advertise in today's society, I thought it would be appropriate to edit the picture, not to drastically change the way they appear but simply to enhance features. Using an app called Airbrush on my phone, I started by making their skin appear smooth. I ensured that the picture didn't look airbrushed and still appeared natural, in order to correlate with my social realism genre. I then made their eyes and eyebrows darker in order to make their eyes 'pop' and stand out. I enhanced the size of Flo's eye (left) in order to make them stand out even more as I found that even when making them darker, they still didn't stand out as much as I would have liked them to. I then reduced, but didn't completely remove, the dark circles under their eyes. This was to make their skin look brighter for the poster but wasn't completely removed so that they still looked natural.

In the before image, you can see how Ann's shoulder (right) is slightly lighter than her facial tone. In order to make my poster more symmetrical and visually appealing, I evened our her skin tone. I then elongated the image to make the pair appear taller which would also help fill space on the film poster. After elongating the image, I slightly restructured Ann's face to make her chin appear slimmer because after elongating the image, her head and torso ratio didn't appear proportionate. Finally, I filled in smile lines of their faces to make their expressions in the final image appear more serious, reflective and subdued. Looking at the image holistically, I achieved my desired look as the image doesn't look drastically different. The image has simply been edited to appear more proportionate and symmetrical in order to enhance its visual appeal.

Ancillary Task: Images

After taking pictures of my actresses Ann and Flo, I went to upload the images from the camera and onto my laptop via an SD card adapter. However, Ella and I ran into some technical difficulties which meant that the files containing our images had randomly become corrupted so we could no longer access them at all. We then took the SD card and the camera to our school's IT office to see if they could help us.

After the department had spent half an hour trying to determine what went wrong and how to recover the images, they decided it would be best for us to leave the SD card with them. Several hours later, we received emails from the IT Network Technician as shown below.

Many of the images weren't able to be recovered, and more were of such poor quality they were unusable. I was then left with only a few images of the many I had taken which was very disappointing. However, luckily, the image I was thinking about using for my poster was recovered. The images that I photographed that were able to be recovered are shown below.

Magazine Cover: Research

Magazine research from Millie Turner

Film Poster: Saul Bass Research

Saul bass film poster research from Millie Turner

Film Trailer: Recording our Soundtrack

Ella and I had planned to use our school's recording studio to create a professional sound with our soundtrack, which is a cover of Sam Smith's 'Leave Your Lover'. However, the date of recording was continuously postponed as some of the equipment in the studio was broken, leaving us unable to use it. We then had to make other arrangements and so we booked a recording room with the head of the Music Department at our school where we could record with our own recording equipment. I have a microphone for personal use which easily plugs into a computer with a USB chord. My microphone, a Blue Yeti, meant that Ella and I were able to record ourselves and the piano cover onto an Apple Mac, into Logic Pro. We arranged for us to meet our friend Molly who plays piano, and we were able to borrow the head of the Music Departments personal electric keyboard.

After recording the piano piece, alongside the primary tune which Ella and I sung, Molly left and Ella and I made the finishing touches to our piece which included several harmonies which we recorded in order to layer and add depth to the song. We sang the song softly so that it would correlate with our films delicate issue and which also compliments our soft focus and dismemberment shots in the trailer. Now that we have completed our film trailers soundtrack, we need to focus on attaching the soundtrack to our film trailers footage, as our film trailer is currently accompanied by Sam Smith's original version of 'Leave Your Lover'. In order to apply the soundtrack to our film trailer, I will upload the song from Ella's memory stick, onto my YouTube account where we can then YouTube convert the video into a format that will be able to apply to our film trailer.

Film Trailer: Location Shots

My Parent's Bedroom and Ella's Bedroom

We used two bedroom locations as we filmed at my house first but the layout of my bedroom meant that we were unable to get the high angle shots we wanted. We then used Ella' bedroom as we wanted the location to match the identities of the characters: late teenagers. This meant that on camera, our characters were shown in suitable and relatable settings to their identities.

My Shower room
My shower room acted as a place where our two primary characters could be intimate, away from the public eye. My shower room also has warm toned lighting which is what we desired as we believed it would heighten the and emphasise the romance between the characters, which would be conveyed to the audience.

My Car
Despite it not necessarily being a location itself, it is where several shots were taken. We used the car to isolate our central protagonist from her love interest, Maggie, and Maggie's boyfriend Brad. We used the car to physically demonstrate the distance that is growing in Maggie and Alice's relationship.

My Living Room
We used my living room as the location where we'd film Alice and Maggie's argument. This is to highlight how the negativity and homophobia of their peers has intruded into the 'safe' places, which is the primary issue with cyber bullying, as it doesn't stop at the school gates, in continues into your home life.

Ella's Living Room

We also used Ella's living room as it provided a safe place for Alice to be herself with her friends. Ella's living room also had warm hued lighting which we used to continue the warm lighting throughout the trailer.

The Atrium (School)

We used the our school as one of the locations in our film trailer as it determined the ages of the main characters. This would help our audience recognise their ages and would ultimately increase identification between the audience and characters which is essential in having a successful film with deep and explored character profiles. We used the largest and most open internal area at our school to make Alice seem much more isolated during the shots of her walking alone through the atrium.

The Dark Room

We used the dark room at our school to further enhance the isolation that Alice is feeling. The room is pitch black and Alice's face is illuminated by the laptop screen where she is reading the negative and hateful comments directed at her.The darkness of the room was effective as it attains many connotations that we wished to portray, such as how isolated it makes Alice and also projects the internal despair, Alice is feeling while being bullied for her sexuality, into her external environment. Also, the light of the laptop screen piercing through the darkness highlights truly how invasive cyber bullying is.

Film Trailer: Twitter Accounts

Once deciding that Twitter would be the most effective social media platform to use, Ella and I then created fake accounts for the primary, secondary and background characters from our film trailer. We created a total of 5 twitter accounts, one each for: Alice, Maggie, Brad and 2 bullies. These accounts were meant to give our trailer audience an insight into their thoughts and to highlight the cyberbullying aspect of the storyline.

I created a fake twitter account for Maggie's boyfriend: Brad. Brad is supposed to be the ring leader of the cyberbullying as he vents his anger online, directed at Alice. His anger is vented in the forms of tweets, which the audience can see in the trailer, as illustrated in the screenshot from the first draft of our film trailer below.

I also screenshot my phone screen after tweeting some 'angry' tweets from Brad's perspective. I tweeted several tweets so that when Ann was scrolling through Alice's twitter feed during filming, it would truly highlight the extent of the bullying. To highlight the bullying's extent, Ella and I decided to create 2 background characters which would play the roles of bully's, supporting Brad. These 2 bullies were called Holly and Steve. Holly and Steve both contribute to the bullying by tweeting mean messages to Alice and supporting Brad, as illustrated by Holly below.

Steve also supports Brad and Holly in the cyber attack against Alice, the concept of '3 is a crowd' is really evident here as gradually, Alice receives more hateful messages which evidently negatively affect her. Maggie's twitter account wasn't truly necessary for this scene, however we created one anyway for dramatic effect. During the cyber attack against Alice, Maggie is placed in a difficult position where she stuck between a feud. This therefore meant that there wasn't much for Maggie to tweet about. Ella and I decided that we'd still create an account for our fictional character, but instead of her tweeting hate fuelled comments, she too would vent her feelings, which were contrasting to Brad's, as illustrated below.

Film Trailer: Social Media Theme

In my film trailer, I included the theme of Social Media and in it, I explored the negative aspects of the sites that are preaching ‘connection’ with other people. Cyberbullying is a very alive aspect of peoples lives during the digital age, something that is far more invasive than any other form of bullying. I wanted to include this in my film because of its social relevance to todays society, and exploring issues such as these is something that conforms with the conventions of social realism dramas. The Social Media platform that Ella and I decided to use was Twitter. Twitter promotes speaking your mind in 'tweets' meanwhile connecting with other people around you. These tweets would act as the focal point for the cyberbullying against our central protagonist Alice. We also chose Twitter because Twitter accounts where relatively simple to create which meant that it would be easier for us to simulate cyberbully for our film trailer.

Film Trailer: Brink Vision

In my film trailers credits, I credited a distribution company called Brink Vision. I did this because my independent production company isn't well established to the point of becoming its own distributer yet. I researched into independent distribution companies as I didn't feel as though my independent social realist film would have realistically been distributed by a large and popular distributor like Lionsgate.

While researching, I came across Brink Vision (http://www.brinkvision.com/) which seemed to be the perfect distributor for my film. This is because it prides itself in distributing and enabling people to watch 'Indie Films Worth Watching', which appears to be their slogan as it is featured boldly on their website, as hyperlinked above.