Final Cut Fonts Experiments

Inspiration- 'Prisoners' Trailer

This is the trailer for the film 'Prisoners' This includes two main male characters both played by Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal.

We came across this trailer, and after watching this we were instantly inspired to so something similar. The trailer is based around the idea of abduction. It is Thanksgiving in America, and a family are going over to a friends.

Both families have a young daughter, these two go outside to play, this is when we then see an old RV, a very quick glance. This is the criminals. The parents get panicky and eventually phone a detective. I think although this is a thriller based genre, it has a hint of action with the fights, weapons and 'hard' looking men. Especially the detective, he is shown to be a strong character. His hair is slicked back, and has a tattoo on is neck. this gives him a cool attitude towards what he does and who he deals with.

I think that if characters like this are shown, I would watch the trailer. When characters are attractive the audience will be more drawn to watch. Whether its a certain actor they like, or someone they like the look of.

Weather conditions in this, are ones we would like to use in our trailer. It gives off a weird feeling and we want this trailer to make the audience feel uncomfortable.  We are using the ideas of rainy, dull and grey conditions. If the weather was sunny and bright, this would make the atmosphere brighter and this is not what we are aiming for.

We have decided that we are going to do something similar to this for our final trailer.

Film Poster- White Chicks

This is our version of a film poster, this isn't the best work and we could improve but it shows basic conventions.

We took an image of Beverly Hills from Google and blurred it using an effect in PowerPoint. This gave the background a bit of mystery. This also ties in with the identity badges of the FBI. Taking another image of the main characters, we put this in Photoshop and took away the white background so it fits nicely onto the background.

We needed to add the title and names of the actors, We chose to use white because of the title 'White Chicks'. Looking at examples of film posters online, some have a star rating, we added this in and pretended that it was by a newspaper, as a lot of newspapers do ratings on films.

 

Looking at other examples, they all have the billing block at the very bottom. We had trouble putting this in, but finally it worked. It doesn't look perfect, and its a bit blurred but it shows the basic convention.

I think that to improve this, the main image could have been a lot bigger, this may have made the poster and excess background come to use.

Our Plot Summary

 

This is our plot summary as of now, we decided to go with this idea.

 

We decided to call this 'The Taking' This is the most suitable as two young children are being taken and will not be found. 'Abandoned' and 'Left At Home' did not fit nicely into our plot.

We knew we wanted to film outside, so we said the two young children were playing outside in the streets, because we have a dead end road that we can film in with an alley at the bottom, this was ideal. we want our audience to feel drawn in and want more from the film trailer, this is going to be brief and to the point. We don't want it to give too much away, but we don't want it to stay hidden. We want something in between. The two older siblings are more mature, however the eldest is the most responsible. The second eldest, is known as a strong character, however this isn't shown verbally. The eldest is shown as a strong character verbally but physically she will not be able to defend herself. This is why we want her to go search for the children, as when the audience find that the second youngest is stronger in defending himself they will feel gutted that it wasn't him and think of a possible, happy ending to the film.

I think that the plot summary is more for a whole film, so we are going to shorten this so that less is given away and more mystery is shown. We said that the criminal will be shown in the trailer, we still aren't sure whether to show them or not. If we were too, it would be a glimpse. Very quick cuts. We want this to be a surprise, or maybe even a shock to our audience.

 

To conclude, we want this to be short and sweet. The problem last year, is we over-complicated our storyline too much, this didn't fit into the two minutes we had and made it quite confusing to understand. This year, we are going to create it so that it flows nicely and is easier for the audience to grasp what is going on.

15 characters & 15 locations

15 characters,
(Names)

• Emily
• Conor
• Michael
• Holly
• Sophie
• Grace
• Mark
• Ayyaz
• Kerry
• Rebecca
• Katie
• Tom
• Extras from filming areas, e.g Busy streets..

We didn't count exactly 15, as in our ideas we don't have a lot of characters. Although in the early stages of planning we have lots of extras, this may change in the future.

15 locations,

• Parks
• House
• Bedroom
• Forests/woods
• Other relatives houses
• Shed
• Garage
• Garden
• End of the road
• Busy streets
• Shops
• Dead ends
• Alleyways
• Fields
• Dark pathways w/ streetlights

These will all be filmed in dim lighting and in grey, dull or rainy weather conditions, this adds to the feel of the trailer and story and we want the audience to feel the atmosphere too.
As explained in our initial ideas, we chose these as we feel they are similar to what would be shown in a thriller/horror trailer, and is different to other locations. If we were doing something like Romance, bright lighting, sunny weather and locations such as parks and beaches would be idea for this.
this comes to conclude that different locations are expected to be seen in different genres of film.

Initial Ideas

Initial Ideas for Film Trailer:
Our inspiration was the film trailer for 'Prisoners' shown in another blog post.

We have a range of ideas that we had and put them all together to see what we came up with, we came up with ideas for the genre, title, characters and locations. We also had props ideas that we thought of using that would benefit and add to our general ideas.

We knew that we wanted to go with a thriller/ action genre, as we researched different trailers such as 'Wanted', 'Olympus Has Fallen' and 'Collateral Damage' these were all examples of action films. As the thought process went on and we gathered more ideas, we started to change our genre slightly. As of now we are doing Thriller/Horror. We are happy with this new genre as we have new ideas to incorporate.

We may base our trailer around the idea of 'Abduction' which is shown in the trailer 'Prisoners'. We wanted something to do with missing characters and a main criminal. Our first idea was having four younger children in a house, who's parents say they will be back at a certain time as they are going out for  a bit. Then the parents never return, after their due time home bad things start to happen to the children. We expanded our thoughts:

• Whispering voices to add tension and eery-ness
• Blackouts and quick cuts
• Eyes looking out of the blinds into the darkness
• Raindrops sliding down the window pane

We thought of these as additions to our original ideas. We thought that this would add more mystery and could create these using good editing skills.
After these ideas, we found some that would work better than the ones we already had. Taking the idea of abduction from 'Prisoners' we knew we wanted to expand ideas in this area. Previously before this, we had the parents going missing. Following the lines of Prisoners, we are now having the two youngest siblings, Male and Female to go missing. We have a basic plot summary (Separate Blog Post) we didn't want to copy this completely, so we have two older siblings involved and no parents.

We had initial ideas for locations, but they weren't big in this area. We had a house, garages, gardens, alleyways, streets and more. These are just a few as we need a lot of locations if we are using quick cuts. We don't want the audience to get bored of the same location in multiple shots. We thought gardens and garages would be idea for this genre, they are mysterious and anything could happen around these. Especially near garages, these are known to be a target in rough areas.
Another idea was a shed with tools inside. This gives a touch of creepiness and violence without using any action.
I found an example of what we would like to create, basing this only on the editing, sound and titles. This is tense and exciting to watch. Our aim is to get something like this.