Evaluation Q4

During our research, planning and evaluation stages for our A2 coursework we had to use a number of new media technologies in order to help create our trailer. This included specific software programmed associated with Apple Macs, e.g. Final Cut and Garageband. Also YouTube - which helped us research our film trailer inspirations, and blogger which is where we've shown all of our working progress up to the finished products. It was a learning curve working with the different programmes, and they were all very helpful as part of our coursework.


Final Cut-

Final cut was the programme used to put all of our film clips together, and for editing purposes. When uploading the clips onto the Macs, Final Cut isn't the programme we put them on first. To begin with we had to put them onto iMovie and drag them down into the box so they were all together. This didn't take too long, and once it was done we were then able to import them to Final Cut from there. The editing process was fairly straightforward from there, we dragged the individual clips together and began cutting them down to the correct size, as well as adding in different transitions to make the editing run smoothly. We didn't have many problems when doing this,only when we tried adding in further clips from a different camera but we eventually got that sorted out so we could carry on with our trailer without any further issues.

Garageband-

Garageband is a programme on the Macs specifically designed to create music from scratch. As we're not allowed to feature any existing music in our work (e.g. chart music) this gave us the opportunity to create a musical piece to fit the genre of our trailer and allow us to be creative and explore the different styles of music. In terms of our trailer we wanted to create something that gradually built up and reached a climax towards the end so it would fit in nicely with our plot. We began creating the piece and the main instrument was a piano, which started off quiet and began to get increasingly louder throughout - when the tension was high. Another feature of Garageband was adding beats into the background, so the music didn't sound shallow or too quiet. It was fairly challenging to find the right pace to fit the piano but in the end I think it all fitted together perfectly. We also added in a couple of sound effect near the end of the piece, which also fitted into the plot. It was important to make our music long enough to fit the duration of the trailer,and thankfully when importing our music into final cut it was just the right length to fit.

YouTube-

YouTube was extremely helpful and allowed us to search for inspirational trailers when thinking about our preferred genre of film. This helped with our research at the beginning, when eventually we found 'Prisoners' and 'Hours' which we used to inspire us for our trailer later on.

Overall I think we have done a great job on our trailer and promotional package. The audience feedback we gathered was great and compared to last time we have more views and opinions.
We have improved many skills and knowledge since last year.

Evaluation Q3

 

 

 

Evaluation Q2

 

Audience feedback for both of these were good, although we do have a few things we could improve on and if we get a chance, we will do this.
Overall, I think they both turned out better products than our first initial ideas. Taking inspiration from real posters and covers really helped us to create these, and having great actors to model go a long way.
To improve, I think it would be darkening the image of Emily on the cover and adding in a real billing block on our poster. This would be ideal.

Evaluation Q1

Magazine Cover Final

 

 

This is our final magazine cover, We decided to go with this image because she seems to be looking for her younger siblings in the dark. This is where we did add in a moon above her head. We think this looked very effective.

From our audience feedback they did like the cover, this is what they stated, exactly:

"The images and text work well together and are contrasting against the dark background"

Although we liked this positive feedback, we asked on what we could improve, this was said:

"I think there needs to be more images added onto the front, maybe shots of the trailer or film itself to give an insight?"

Another point of negative feedback we got was that the image of the main character is too light, and needs to be darker. She looks too washed out and we will improve this next time.

We wanted to only put Emily on the front, since she is the main character and I think that her posture works well for her character.

We will definitely be taking into consideration the negative feedback and improve on this, however we did like the positive comments we had.

Compared to real magazine covers, I think we need to add more onto the front, but this is something we can improve on.

 

Garageband

These are screen shots from our creation in Garage band. We took inspiration again from 'Hours'. We felt that it would work well for our genre since its starts slow and builds up towards tension.

To start off we knew we needed to include some grand piano loops, this gives off a soft vibe whilst the voiceover is playing. We didn't want something to overpower her voice.

To pull this together, we placed a soft bass in the background of everything, this needed to be done since the piano alone wouldn't bee too professional for this. Once the tension builds up, we place some soft beats in the beginning and add onto this with some bigger ones, but not too much so that they distract from the piano. There are a few times where the music will become tense and slow down again, this keeps the audience intrigued.

Altogether we used four different types of loops to create this-

Piano

Beats

Bass

FX

We cut some beats and moved a few notes by double clicking on the loop, to change the original loop into something we wanted, to make things flow a little better.

The use of the beats in the mid section did add some strong tension to this and this was the aim we were going for. We added a stronger bass to the very end to finish everything off. The FX sounds we used were to polish everything. We used the sound of a disappeared caller and the sound of thunder which also relates to our Summit Entertainment institution.

Feedback from audiences said that they liked the music and they way it rises then back down again to create the tension build we wanted to portray.

Film Poster Idea

 

This Is our final film poster, We did edit this on Photoshop. This wasn't hard but it wasn't easy, since when we put the image of Conor into the image as another layer, he somehow became pixelated which we couldn't fix, so we tried our best to get this looking as natural as possible.

We first chose a background to work with on Google and found this darker one with clouds, we felt this would work perfectly because it goes with our genre well.

We then put in the picture of the toy box and bear, taking out the background using the magic wand tool then increasing the contrast.

We took the background out of Emily's image and also increased the contrast. We thought that her eyes needed brightening so we selected these and increased the brightness. This did look better than before. To fix any errors and making things look smooth, we used the blur tool to go around the hair and outlines. We also used this on their faces to give them flawless skin, but not too flawless it was completely noticeable. Taking the background out of Conor was the hardest part, since he has glasses which is hard to go around the edges. His top was black with 'Call Of Duty' written on the front, so we had to take this out using the clone stamp tool. We then increased the brightness of the top so it stands out from the dark background.

We felt that out images worked together and balanced out perfectly fine. We placed the title at the bottom above our tagline. We used white font, this contrasts the black. After discussing the age ratings, we placed this in the top left hand corner to balance everything. The main actors name is also in the top right hand. We made the headshots bigger and smaller depending on their status.

After this, we found we didn't have enough time to create and put in our own billing block, so we searched this on Google and found a template version. We felt this was better than nothing so we placed this in.

Overall we feel our poster does look professional, although some areas such as the pixelating couldn't be helped even though we used a high quality camera for this.

Character Interview: Part of Promotional Package

Emily as Madison:

Interviewer: "Tell me a bit about yourself, about your life?"
Emily: "I was born in the UK, along with my elder sister, brothers and younger sister. I grew up with Eczema, and still am! a bit about me you didn't know."

Interviewer: "Do you have any future plans?"
Emily: "I'm an aspiring singer/songwriter. I have been singing since I was around eleven years old and would like to pursue this as a career."

Interviewer: "What is your favourite subject you are currently studying?"
Emily: "I'm a big fan of English, especially argumentative writing. I like to have debates about things I disagree about and argue them back."

Interviewer: "How did you get into the character of Madison, and was this easy?"
Emily: "It wasn't easy, you have think of yourself in that problem to act it out. You have to become the character sometimes using real material and thinking of past events. This can be hard sometimes, but if you wanna perform your best, go for it."

Interviewer: "How would you describe Madison's character?"
Emily: "She is always getting distracted by the social media and has a fierce personality. She isn't a 'sweet' character. When she actually realises her younger siblings are missing that's when she changes her attitude which I think gives the audience a great twist to see."

Interviewer: "Whilst on set, how was working with other actors?"
Emily: " It was an exciting and new experience. Although I do live with them in real life, I did find it hard to get to grips with the different scenery and backgrounds of the characters, but they did do as they were told which made it easier for me as an actress."

Interviewer: "How was it working with the directors?"
Emily: "It wasn't hard to get along with them, they are both easy going doing their things and do a great job!"


Interviewer: "How does it feel to be playing the main role in the best film of the year 'The Taking'?"
Emily: "The Chance of lifetime, its been amazing to work with the cast and crew whilst learning new things each day."

Interviewer: "Would you consider playing another role for these directors again in the future?"
Emily: "Definitely, I had lots of fun filming this and would do it again!"

Main Character 2- Cody

 

This is the character profile for Cody. He is a year younger than his older sister Madison. His past and where he grew up is the same as Madison's since they both come from the same parents since they come from the same background.
 He also shows his likes and dislikes, along with what he likes to eat. This gives the audience a basic outlook on his character. I think a lot of the audience will be able to relate to his character, since he comes across as sensitive and the typical boy that loves to play video games. He is the sweet type, where other girls would think of him as 'cute' from the way he acts towards his family. Through out the film, his character learns to come out of his shell and become a bit more adventurous. This is where our film will show more of the action/thriller side.
As for the trailer, only giving a sneak peak. His character will remain to have mystery.
We feel this will work for the audience, Madison and Cody are completely different with two different personalities, I think this will work well to draw them in.

Age Ratings

During the making and editing of our film trailer, an important thing to consider were the age ratings. We didn't want our audience to feel they cannot as it would be too high, but not too little as it would  seem weird for them to watch it.
we gathered the different age ratings which are-

Uc- This is suitable for pre-school audiences
U- This stands for Universal and is suitable for children four years and over
PG- This stands for Parental Guidance and is suitable for general viewing
12A- This requires an adult to accompany a child under 12 that is going to see a rated 12A film
12- This is typically not to be sold for children under the age of 12
15- Anyone under the age of 15 will not be able to buy or watch a film rated 15. Things shown in a 15 rated film can include, strong violence, drug taking, sexual nudity and other strong violence and sexual behaviour.
18- Rated 18 films are for adults and anyone below 18 is not allowed to watch an 18 rated film. This shows, strong horror, very strong violence, strong portrayals of sexual activity and other very strong violence and sexual behaviour
R18- This is not to be sold or shown to anybody under the age of 18, since this has very strong sex references and violent behaviour

After finding this information, we discussed what we wanted to happen throughout the rest of our film so we could get an idea of the age rating. Our genre is a hard to define mix of Thriller/Horror/Action. We are going to have strong violence and slight horror throughout. Relating this to the age ratings, we chose to go with 15, which is perfect for our audience. We feel this rating will work well, since it is in-between.

Images for Magazine Cover and Film Poster

 

We have a range of different images, that we took on our last filming session. I took these with a Nikon D3200, except for the very first image.
We gathered the best ones, in which we are possibly going to use on our film poster and magazine cover.
The very first of the bear was gathered to give a slight innocence to the trailer. We did take a range but found this was the best shot as it shows all objects.The next two we had an initial idea of having her posed this way on our film poster, as explained in my previous post it shows she is in search. All explanations of these are on my 'Day 3 Of Filming' post.
We took a range of pictures so we could choose the best one, we can then edit these on Photoshop to make this look as professional as possible.
The second lot of images we took were to get different angles of how he held the gun. We wanted to show this in the best way, so that our poster looked balanced evenly. We took a few of the gun close to his upper body, also away from the body.
The last few are ideas for the magazine cover, whether we will use these exact ones we aren't sure of, but we found that taking different headshots and midshots worked well so we could see which would look better when placed onto the magazine cover we are creating.
We hope these will work effectively, I think that all of the shots we have gathered will work well placed onto our promotional package, we just have to get a balanced composition that our audience would like.

Tagline Tally Chart

Since we had our title in place, we decided we needed to think of a good and catchy tagline that relates to our title and meaning. Thinking of these wasn't too hard, as we had the meaning behind our plot set in our minds and knew what kind of tagline we wanted to create. These were the five different taglines we came up with:

Day Of The Forgotten
Power Of Regret
One Mistake, Leads To Another..
Young Hearts Crushed
What Now.

We found these did fit well with our title and we wanted to see which one worked the best, we did this by asking 20 people from our area on which tagline they would prefer to see if they were to go and watch this, these were the results we collected-

'What Now.' and 'One Mistake Leads To Another..' have the exact same number of votes, this shows that these two would be similarly chosen. However these weren't the most important. 'Young Hearts Crushed' and 'Day Of The Forgotten' were also the same. After asking around, 'Day Of The Forgotten' was preferred to 'Young Hearts Crushed'.
'Power Of Regret' was the most popular amongst all. We asked a friend why they chose this particular as their favourite, Charlotte says-
"I chose this tagline because after reading the plot from a previous questionnaire, I thought this fit perfectly. Its short and to the point with only 5 syllables which makes it easier to pronounce. It doesn't drag on like most."
After taking in this information, we have decided to definitely go with this tagline. We are going to see how it works, and if it does effectively. If not we will take it out and replace with another.

Final Title Idea

We have finally chosen the title font we are going to use for our film, and promotional package. We are going to be using this font:

 

 

We have chosen this title after gaining feedback from people in our area. One named Lucy said,
"I prefer this title to the other, it has a scribbled effect which I really like."
Another named Joshua said,
"It fits in really well with the plot. I don't know why, it just does. You know, you just get that creepy feeling?"
After hearing this from others, we have decided this was the best to go for. If the audience like to see it we want the best we can possibly get.
We are going to try it out by putting it onto our film poster and magazine cover to see how they turn out. If it doesn't work, we shall switch back to the other.

Day 3 of Filming..

DAY 3-
 This is our third filming session ,we have filmed over half of our trailer now. We are now aiming to finish filming by Tuesday.
We started filming around 10.30 this morning, after getting our actors ready, we ran through a section of the script we were aiming to get done for today.
We decided we wanted our actors to have completely different outfits when they are acting. We wanted this to be a different day. We thought this would look more effective to show the past and present, to show an outline of the life this family live.
After making up the actors, we too the main two characters and took their images for our magazine cover and film poster for our promotional package.


Taking images for our Magazine Cover and Film Poster
 This wasn't easy getting the correct lighting but we overcame this by placing them in front of a light background with the natural light behind us. This did work out well as we focused on the film poster images first. Since we took an image of the bear and toy-box previously we needed to capture some headshots of the characters.
We placed Emily so that she was angled towards the camera, but looking to the side as if she is search. We had her looking towards the right. We felt this was a suitable position for Emily since we were taking the inspiration from the film poster, 'The Box' and following our ideas on our second film poster idea.
We then took separate headshots of Conor since we are going to edit these using Photoshop to help our poster look as professional as possible.
We had Conor looking to the left side whilst holding a gun- which is a false Mini Uzi. We are going to Photoshop this to make it look realistic. He is holding this to symbolize protection against himself and his older sister whilst on hunt for their younger siblings. We feel this will balance out the poster images perfectly.
I used a Nikon D3200 to take these images, making sure we get the best quality for our poster.

Magazine Cover
We used Emily alone for this. We have the idea of a full moon, she is below looking up and clutching the bear with a single tear rolling down the right side of her face.
We did not get any inspiration for this idea, we simply came up with this alone. We feel this shows her guilt and regret for leaving her younger siblings to go outside alone.
We wanted to show her clutching the bear since it is the only belonging that is shown in the trailer, since this has lots of meaning to the younger siblings and this is the only object left behind from their disappearance.
We did find this hard to capture a tear on her face, we tried different alternatives such as applying light directly to her face, and thickening the water with flour to see if this made a difference. This didn't show any change, so we are going to Photoshop a visible tear onto her face. We also applied a black eyeliner to the outer V of the top lash line and bottom lash line, we did blend this out with a pencil brush to create the effect where it has smudged by her tears.
We are happy with our images and will edit these during the week.

Filming
After this, we started on filming. We continuously filmed with a small break every three hours. All actors did well in keeping in their character, they found this fun but also hard work to keep up. As a director it wasn't easy to get emotion into the younger actors but they finally grasped onto this. Emily- the eldest, didn't need to be told where to go or how to say certain lines, since she seems a natural when it came to this.
Our next set of filming will include both Emily and Conor acting, this will take approximately an evening from 5pm-7pm the latest as we need a change in day.
Overall we are happy with the filming we have got done, we took a few shots of certain scenes we felt would need to be done more than once as backup.

Props

We had to consider the props we were going to include in our film trailer. So far we do have quite a lot of these, purely because our trailer takes place in a house where there is natural movement from younger children.
We are happy with the amount of props in this, and especially how they are used also.

1) Colouring Book And Pencils-During the first part of the trailer, a colouring book and pencils are shown.. This is used by the youngest character Zoey, portraying her family by drawing them. This shows her emotion and love for her family through this part of the trailer. This will draw the audience in with her innocence.

2)Mobile Phone- A mobile phone is used by Madison, this shows her teenage self and how she is typically 'Glued to her phone' as the elder generation would say. She is not very communicative when using this. This gives the audience the impression she doesn't typically pay attention.

3)PS3 Device- A PS3 device is used by Cody, he is a teenage boy that loves to play video games, including his number one favourite- Formula One. This is shown in the very beginning of the trailer and shows he is a boy that loves sport and video games.

4) Stuffed Bear-The stuffed bear is a personal possession for both Tyler and Zoey. This was bought for them as a gift by their Dad before he left. This is special to them both and is used in the trailer. This is also featured in the film. The innocence of the children is shown here.

5) Pearls- A string of pearls are placed around the bears neck. These pearls are both Tyler and Zoeys grandmothers, that was passed onto them before her death. Zoey keeps these safe around the bears neck, they are both important items to them both.
Overall we are happy with the props and their meaning behind them, although the audience may not know these.

6) Telephone- Cody is seen using a telephone in the end of the trailer where the climax is raised.

 

Film Poster Ideas And Designs

 

 

These are the two film poster ideas we have come up with, although they are drawn out roughly to get a basic idea of what we want. We took the two fonts we liked most and printed these out along with a billing block.
Following the inspiration from the film posters, 'The Box' and 'Gone', we chose to create something similar. We already knew we wanted the bear to be the main image in the centre to balance everything out, along with the main character, so we included these in the first poster. We tried positioning the title at a slant, to see what effect it would give to the rest of the poster. We found it hard to keep the proportions of everything but we resolved this in the end. We knew this was going to be an American based trailer, and guns associate with this. We placed a gun on top of a cloth in the bottom left hand corner to keep the image balanced out.
I think the first turned out well, however I don't like the composition and the images used. I Feel this wouldn't be enough to capture the audiences eye and could be improved.

We used the second title for our next poster idea. I prefer this title as it looks better with our genre and the rest of our images, It looks as if it has been scribbled or drawn, and this can relate to Zoey the youngest character. We changed the composition and our main inspiration for this one was 'The Box'. We feel this worked better with our characters. We wanted to include the main character, but since Cody is also an important character we placed him to the side and a little below Madison to show her status is bigger than his.
We have shown her status by making a bigger headshot, and Cody has also got one but smaller in size showing these two are the important characters on search for their younger brother and sister. I feel this would catch the audiences eye straight away. I asked a few class peers what they liked about this poster and most said they liked the font and image choice. We had trouble trying to get the sizes of the characters right as we didn't want the bear to out do them. We did overcome this by positioning out with a pencil before hand. We chose Cody to be holding a small pistol gun, since they are in America and lots of teen boys have these. I think this also makes the genre hard to define, although we are going for a thriller/horror we have included signs of action and adventure. This is what we would want our actual film to be like.
We are happy with this poster and will go to develop this one, we are using this one as we like the composition and images used better than the last.

Editing- Final Cut

This is the start of our editing in Final Cut. It took a while to get used to at first, but once we had figured out the basics, this was easy to use. 

After we had imported our clips, we chose the ones that we thought were the best. We had cut these down to our minimal second to watch through then cut again.

We found this easy to do in Final Cut, by selecting the blade tool and cutting what was needed, we found it a good thing to film our scenes longer than we would, just so we could cut them down to what we needed. I found the blade tool very easy to use, then to remove certain parts that we didn't need, I took the select tool and removed this by pressing the 'Del' key.

We completed the first section of editing in around ten minutes. We found this was good for the amount we needed to edit.

As of now, we had gotten our institution clip, and placed that at the very beginning of the clips. Summit is the institution we chose to use, and at the very end of this clip It leads into the music for the 'twilight' film, so we cut this out using the blade tool.

We have added in our fading transitions, so that it gives a realistic view of what we want our trailer to look like in the long run.

We are very happy with our filming and editing.