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.