Final Ancillary Tasks

Completed Short Film

Refer to this for my evaluation when I talk about my film and draw comparisons to other media products.

Research into Film Posters

Film posters are used to advertise a specific film, they normally include text or/and a image. Nowadays they often contain photographs of the main actors. Whereas prior to the 1990s they often contained illustrations instead of photos. The writing on a film poster usually contains the name of the film in big, stand-out lettering, it may also include: characters names, a tag line, the release date and the directors name.

Film posters are commonly found inside and outside cinemas and also on the street or in shops. The same image can also appear in newspapers or magazines, on the internet, as a flyer or in DVD casings.

A teaser poster is a promotional poster that aims to not give away many details to the plot, theme or characters. The main reason for the teaser poster is to grab the attention of the audience and generate hype about the film, and a tagline is often included.

Here are some teaser posters that I gained inspiration from for my film poster:

In this poster I liked the colour scheme as it highlighted strong bright colours, in comparison to a dark background. This is how my poster needs to look whether the colours were light again dark or vice versa.

I liked this poster as it has inspired me to have an eye catching image on the front that will give a clear outline of what the film is about and the style of genre it is.

This film poster is clearly directed at sci-fi fans due to the view of the globe and a robotic eye in the background, the audience can gather this impression without even having to look up or know anything about "Transformers" as a whole. With this in mind I have a clear idea of how my poster needs to look in terms of fitting the look of a psychological thriller, and the audience need to be clear on this even at a slight glance at the poster, this will be effective advertising if I achieve this and it will vastly increase the "hype" around my short film.

Research of Film Magazines

There are film magazines that are produced in near enough every country in the world, from places ranging from Britain to India. The most popular ones in Britain are perhaps "Empire Magazine", "British Film" and "Little White Lies", I decided to look at these ones as they represent not only big theatrical releases but also give you an idea of how short films are reviewed and the typical conventions of the inside of a film magazine and the style of writing a review is, which is usually quite informal and is truthful in whether the film is worth watching or not.

"British Film" is an online publication that is read by hundreds of people weekly, it covers the British film industry. It was first released in 2005 as a proper magazine but was transformed into a online publication in 2007 and has remained in that format ever since. It reports on British productions and also on films that are released in Britain, it's main focus is on British actors and directors and often includes interviews with them. This was particularly important for my film and the style I wanted to go for as it is a British production with a whole British cast, so if I could see the layout that this was following I could gather information and ideas on how mine should be laid out. 

The Empire Magazine is a British magazine produced monthly, in common with most British magazines, Empire is populist in approach and coverage. It reviews both mainstream and art films.

Little White Lies is a bi-monthly, British independent movie magazine that features writing, illustration and photography related to cinema.



Update of Progress - Change to film and Final planning

We decided to change our teaser trailer to a film. We have kept the same scenes and added some additional ones, with a different ending so that it suited the conventions of a film. It made more sense to change it into a film as when we were filming scenes for the trailer, the scenes we had planned out were too long for a teaser trailer and each scene was coming out at approximately 30 seconds each. By the time we had finished filming the majority of scenes we wanted to keep in our film, we had about 3.30 minutes of footage which was too long for our trailer which we wanted to last for about 2 minutes, therefore it made sense to make a film and add in a couple more scenes and change the ending so it would make the audience question what had happened with an ambiguous ending, so they would have something to think about and be able to come up with their own conclusions.

Update of Teaser Trailers Progress - Changes and Improvements

We decided to change the order of scenes 5 and 6 because we wanted to have a more dramatic cliffhanger at the end and we decided to scrap scene 7 as we thought for a teaser trailer the footages duration would have been too long. Furthermore the script that had been put in place seemed too wooden and rigid for the dramatic moments in the scene, so we decided to improvise and make up our own dialogue and scripting as we went along, depending on the scene and how intense the acting had to be, as we really wanted the audience to grasp the feelings of the actors and their emotions even through the short duration of the teaser trailer.

Update of Teaser Trailers Progress

We attempted to film our first couple of scenes where the car is in use and the boy is killed, however we ran into some difficulties such as the road we were using was a bit busy with cars sometimes getting in the way. Also another problem was that when the camera was filmed from the boys perspective with the car hitting him it was difficult to suggest that he was being run over without actually showing he was. Therefore we have decided to use the school drive as there will be no cars in the way and also we can use quick cuts from the boy to the driver without actually having to get near the boy with the car as it will be shot at different times between them. For instance the cars driving sequence will be shot first and then the boy walking down the drive will be shot after and then with our editing package, the narratives will be merged.