Commonalities in my texts
In my work I had a few common themes throughout such as the backgrounds in my official poster, teaser poster, magazine cover and trailer. I had a background of tree's in all of them as they are associated with one of our protagonists, the journalist Peter Stone as he has some scenes in a forest and being outdoors, so I decided to echo that into the rest of my work. However, all of the tree's look different to one another but I just wanted some synergy within all my different texts. Some of the common occurring colours that were used for our palette were red, white and black in all of my texts to connote danger, death, loss and innocence.
Chosen character in the texts
We chose Oliver Wyatt (Journalist-Peter Stone), because he features in the trailer the most, so the audience would be more familiar with that character and audiences like to see familiar faces and will easily recognise the character the character and immediately know the film as he is directly associated with it, even when he features on different things like posters and magazine covers. Peter Stone wore a white long sleeve shirt with no tie, a black blazer, black trousers, black shoes and for most of his scenes he's seen holding his camera. We wanted Oliver to wear this costume purely because we wanted his character to look professional, mature and emphasise his intelligence. The poses of the character would typically be him looking around as he gathers evidence and taking photos. Some of his facial expressions would be Peter Stone looking immersed into the investigation and the evidence, constantly with a puzzled and curious look on his face when he's concentrating and in deep thought. We have some shots of him looking angry and frustrated which conforms to the male stereotype, but we had to show characters emotions to reveal their emotional journey and the difficulties of what they've all been caught up in.
Character relationships
The relationships suggested are mainly between Detective Maria Jones and the Journalist Peter Stone, they make a deal to work together for their own benefit (so Peter can get a good story and Maria can finally solve the case and maintain her good reputation as a detective). However they both end up clashing and disagreeing to them both being intelligent, headstrong, independent and stubborn. Jones is particularly intimidated by Stone because she's had this career for a long time and she's very experienced, and yet a young male journalist could potentially solve the case before she does and doesn't want him to take any credit for her case. Because she's so intelligent and successful she feels superior to not only her colleagues, but to Peter as well and his only agenda is to get a good story to commence his career in Journalism and to help others by putting a stop to the killer. So they both end up reluctantly working together, when they both know they need each others help and a rivalry begins to establish between them. By having a relationship like this between the two lead protagonists, the audience will be captivated in the trailer by seeing the juxtaposition of them both working together and disputing with one another, so this will result in the audience wanting to know how their relationship develops and whether they end up finally solving the case together and being successful in their jobs.
Narratives included in the print texts
For my print texts I had the same tagline on them for the posters which was "The truth will be exposed" the key word "exposed" is used in relation to the Journalist and his camera. The tagline suggests that there's a mystery that needs to be solved, and that it will be over once and for all. In my two posters and my magazine cover, I drained the saturation to refer to the low lit scenes in my trailer and to the reflect the genre conventions into my print texts, it also makes them look more filmic and sets the tone of the film. The low saturation and exposure connotes to my audience that there's an unwelcoming and mysterious atmosphere set in the film, which is a continuous theme throughout my print texts and trailer.
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The print texts attracted my audience by having the same actor featuring in all my posters and magazine cover, and other people in my group had done the same thing but we all used unique photos each. By having the same actor featuring in all of the print texts, the audience can recognise and immediately know what film we are promoting. We did this for the same reason people use very famous actors in their films; they have such immense star power and the public will recognise them and know they are talented and want to watch the film, purely because they recognise the actor and have seen them in previous films. I also used the colour red, which strongly contrasted with the grey, black and other sombre colours. Red is a very striking colour and so would be successful in commanding the audiences attention and therefore allowing the audience to make connotations of their own of what red could symbolise and what the poster as a whole entails to the audience in terms of narrative. On my magazine cover I had small sections of text mentioning information about other films (Psychosis, Delirium, Soldier Unknown, Here I come and Love me) By advertising other films, I can attract more people into buying the magazine cover if it were to be a real one and hopefully getting them to read all the information on my trailer/film as well.
Genre conventions and Synergy
I emphasised one of the simple thriller paradigms of key lighting by draining the saturation, decreasing the exposure and turning down the opacity. This created a dramatic and eerie look whilst also making the main image and the background blend together. I made use of some other basic conventions like my colour scheme, with the colours red, white and black. Red served the purpose of suggesting that the film would entail danger, blood and violence the white would reflect purity and innocence and the black would connote death, loss and mystery. By using all of these three colours I'm already immediately telling the audience what genre my film is and what may happen. I have synergistic features in all of my print texts such as the background of tree's, using the same character, low lighting, same colours, identical font and tagline. Although I have used some continuous features, I have altered them so the print texts do not look completely identical e.g. for the title "Contradiction" I use the colour red in my magazine cover and official poster, but for my teaser poster I use the colour black.
Multimedia technology
In our Premier Pro project, we used a diverse range of effects within our trailer for transitions, sound effects, accompaniment, lighting, duration etc. For our transitions, we have cross dissolves, fade to blacks, fade to white, additive dissolves and jump cuts. Cross dissolves were used to infer that time is passing as the Journalist works on the case, fade to blacks reflect the night time, danger and foreboding, fade to white was primarily used for our short scenes of the crime scene with the dead bodies and crime scene tape, this was to suggest that a camera was being used between each shot of the bodies as in a real crime thriller they would take pictures of all the evidence at the scene. Another connotation of the fade to white was to show that the trailer had moved on quickly in time to the morning of the crime scene. Jump cuts were used to increase the pace of the trailer for the final build up of the third act where all the action and violence is mostly revealed, this is to excite and engage the audiences attention. We found an area on the school computers to source lots of sound effects, some of them were the thunder claps in the flash backs, boom sounds for the appearance of the production logo and captions, the police sirens for the crime scene, overlapping voices for the Arc shot of Peter, car screeching for a car swerving on a road and a gun shot for the very end of the build up. We recorded some of our own SFX and one of them was a news report briefly explaining the crime that had taken place the night before and a recording of the killers voice and editing it in to sound like a phone call to Maria Jones telling her that her career is over if she doesn't solve the case for the last time and that time is slipping away for her. The soundtracks were probably the most difficult thing to edit into our trailer as we wanted all the separate tracks to blend together, and not seem like sudden changes of music. We made use of the exponential fade and constant fade between tracks to smoothly play one after the other or between looped tracks of a certain section of the music. In the process of editing the tracks together and overlapping them with the visual aspect of our trailer, we managed to create a few moments of synchronous sound with the motion of the clips e.g. the ending of the track "Death Match" when Peter looks down, the dubbed over clip with Peter speaking with a recording overlapping as he says the same line and the gunshot sound as Peter punches the steering wheel in the car. Some of our scenes were to bright and didn't suit the atmosphere of our assigned genre and so we altered the contrast of the clip so it appeared darker and for the survivors flash backs early on we needed a black and white effect to connote that these scenes are in the past and therefore make it obvious they are flashbacks. We did this by going to saturation then changing the contrast to gain that effect. To make some of our clips faster such as the prison scene and the tree shot, we increased the speed duration of the clip along with the tempo of the soundtrack. For all of my Photoshop projects I decreased the saturation, exposure and increased the gamma slightly and I did this to blend the main image and the background together and make them look like one image. Once I made the main image darker and changed the opacity, the overall image looked more intense, mysterious and creepy and so I had managed to include a thriller convention of low key lighting in my print texts. When I was initially cropping the main image before importing a background, I had to spend hours making sure I had removed as much of the outside around the main image. I did this by using the polygonal lasso to crop the large areas of excess image, magic wand to delete small spaces and curved edged areas and the eraser for some of the finishing touches. Once the main cropping was done, I imported the background and began using the blending tool to smooth out the edge of the main image so it blended into the background and didn't stand out like an individual image. One of the most tedious tasks was fixing the hair; I had to use the smudge tool to make the hair look less cropped and give it a more natural look. So the hair eventually looked more blended with the background and it wasn't as obvious that it was cropped. For the text, I experimented with different fonts that look simplistic and professional, I adjusted the size, the distance between letters, the height of the text, tested out different colours, made the text bold or regular, used a drop shadow and an outer glow to highlight the word "exposed".
Institutional information
Our production company is called Siberian Studios, this was the name of our production company in our AS opening title sequence MUTATION. Our reason for keeping the same production company is because we liked the simplicity of how it looked; the logo didn't look too complex but it looked modern and professional. The initial reason for having the name and logo in the first place is because we had to think about what we wanted our production company to represent and we wanted to symbolise power, intelligence, resilience and to be seen as a force to be reckoned with. We felt that a close up of a Siberian Husky's face encapsulated all those characteristics for our production company; they are a powerful and strong breed of dog, they are very intelligent, resilient to harsh conditions and treacherous journeys and they are also quite fearsome animals, they will protect their pack so there's a sense of community as well by having Siberian Husky as our production company logo. Our certificate rating is a 15, this is because the themes in the hypothetical film would have been quite mature but nothing too excessively violent, no sexual references were made in the trailer and gore was kept to a minimum. Because of some of the ages of our characters we wanted to bring the certificate rating down to a 15 as we have a character as young as 17 and one in their very early 20's, so by having younger characters we had the ability to appeal to a younger audience and therefore expand our audience too. Two of our other characters (Detective Jones and the falsely accused prisoner) were significantly older than the younger characters (from the age of approximately 40 and above), so by having characters within this age range we can have a mature audience as well as a young one, as a variety of ages have been represented and the diverse age of people will all be able to relate to the characters that are of a similar age to them.
Effectiveness of campaign and conclusion
To conclude I think that overall that we collectively as a group and as individuals that we have had a relatively successful campaign; we have appealed to a range of age groups by having varied ages of our characters, we have all used the same actor for our posters and magazine covers so the audience is familiar with his face, there's some strong elements of synergy with the fonts, taglines and colour schemes. All three of us have shared the trailer on social media to receive as much audience feedback as possible (real films would have their own Facebook page and other social media accounts to promote the film), we have all made magazine covers and posters to promote the made up film and I did an extra poster as a teaser poster because I found out that lots of films make simplistic posters as a teaser to excite their audience rather like how they make a teaser trailer or short preview of the film. We even sent the trailer to the St Neots museum so they can upload it onto their Facebook page because we used their old real life prison to film some of the scenes in our trailer. Overall we have done as much as possible to promote our made up film with all of our different texts and making use of our full access to social media and all of our hard work has gained us a lot of positive feedback, so our campaign has definitely been a success.
excellent level of detail Kirsten, well done.
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