Ancillary Task 2 - Magazine Front Cover - Audience Feedback

Audience Feedback - 'Reel Film' Magazine Front Cover:

- Looks professional.

- Too many ellipses throughout.

- Lots of info on the front, which is similar to 'Total Film' and 'Empire'.

- Needs a new tag line, base it on the content in the magazine.

- Text makes the cover stand out.

- All the font is the same, keeping with the synergy of the magazine brand.

- Consistent colour scheme keeps the magazine clean.

- Head overlaps magazine title well, it means the title is still readable.

- 'The Survivalist' article is a bit of a mouthful - too many syllables.

- Exclamation point needs to be red in the 'exclusive' article.

- Change the wording arrangement of the 'exclusive' article.

- Contains all the conventions of a professional magazine e.g. price, issue number, bar code, website etc.

From the feedback I have received, I can conclude that the changes I have to make on my magazine front cover are purely textual. Changes will be minor, such as, finding a new tag line for my magazine; changing the wording of two of the articles; removing some of the ellipsis and changing the colour of an exclamation point. These are all very minimal changes that effect the overall flow of the magazine and it's effectiveness at selling itself to potential readers. Lots of positive feedback was received, however, as the class thought my magazine front cover was very professional and that it would stand out if it was in a shop environment. It was said that my magazine fitted the conventions of having lots of information on the front cover such as Empire and Total Film. All the information that was on the front cover had the same font style and colour scheme to follow with the synergy of the magazine's brand and the brand of the featured film. Overall, there was lots of feedback about the overall appearance and synergy of the magazine, which was very positive. But, there are a few minor adjustments that need to be made to the wording of the text that features on my front cover in order to improve the flow and self selling qualities of the magazine.

Ancillary Task 1 - Teaser Poster - Audience Feedback

Audience Feedback - First Arrest Teaser Poster:

- The way the two images have been merged is good.

- Differences between the characters are clear. (Protagonist/Antagonist)

- The style of the title fits the conventions of the genre e.g. font, colour and effects.

- The poster is simple and yet effective to intrigue potential viewers.

- There is no tagline - doesn't make an impact on the poster however.

- You can get an idea of what will happen without a tag line by looking at the image itself.

Based on the feedback that I have received from my class, I can conclude that there are not any changes that need to be made to my poster in order to improve it. All feedback that was received was positive and praised all the elements of the poster and it's conventions with other, professional, posters. The class thought that all my text fitted in the genre of action thriller well and there was enough text to make it a teaser poster and I had included all of the information that was necessary on a teaser poster, such as date, title and production company. The image itself was said to have been done well and look good and the style of image I chose makes the difference between the two characters clear, the image gives the viewer a good sense of what might happen in the film without giving anything away. No negative or critical feedback was received, this means that no changes will be necessary to my teaser poster.

Skills Progress

How I developed my skills as an editor:

The first video I used to progress and develop my skills I used during the research and planning stage of our trailer. I edited the animatic on Adobe Premiere Pro and as I usually only use Adobe After Effects I needed a basic tutorial to know how to cut the photos to the correct length, match them with the music and how to create a new project and composition to begin with. The video gave me the skills to edit a lot of the animatic, however, to do some of the effects on the photos such as the flashes and fading out I had to use another source to learn how to use these functions of the editing program. As I am familiar with After Effects' interface, I knew what to look out for when adding new things such as text and effects as Premiere Pro was entirely new to me, but the Adobe functions are the same.

I used this video in order to learn how to use adobe premiere pro cc 2015 in order to animate text in order to create the titles for our animatic so that I could get an idea for how they would be animated. Instead of using a plain text to show where the title would be I wanted to get a sense of how the ending text of the trailer would look. As I was new to premiere pro I had to use video tutorials in order to develop my skills in the program and this developed my skills into a range of programs and not just after effects. This video taught me how to find and use the tools and effects in premiere pro, basic things like key frames and fading I already knew how to do as these skills are transferable but I need to learn where everything is in this new layout. The crew and legal text I created in Photoshop I put in as an image file as it would not be animated, this is the same for the background to the coming soon text too. My skills in Photoshop were already well developed enough due to the fact I take photography as a subject and I have been practicing graphics in my own time for years.

Cinema 4D is a program I used to regularly use but I haven't used it in years and so when creating the production companies intro for our trailer I had to use a video tutorial in order to remember how to animate the text, this video gives a tutorial to very basic text animation but it was enough to jog my memory to all the tools that Cinema 4D has. I just needed a video to get me started again with the program as it is very complicated and there are lots of settings and tools that I need to be re familiarised with before I could attempt to create a logo for our trailer.

The final way that I developed my skills as an editor was by learning to use the masking tool in Adobe After Effects CC 2015, I learnt how to use this tool in order to create a creative transition for the main title to appear on screen alongside fading onto the screen. I am well practiced in After Effects so I already knew how to use most of the tools and effects in the program well but the only tool that I never have really touched is the masking tool. So I watched this video in order to learn and understand how to the use the tool to its full advantage so that I could create whatever effect my mind came up with in order to make the trailer exactly how I imagined.

Planning - Copyright Free Music/Sound Effects

Music:

The music I chose was a piece that I found on a copyright free YouTube channel, they upload songs that are copyright free and so they can be used for all kinds of projects, whether it be for educational purposes or for recreational or commercial uses. I chose this song in particular as it fitted the theme of thriller well and will give a spooky and mysterious mood to the trailer; it also has a section towards the end of the song where the music builds in volume and speed and so this is good to show lots of points of action that would be in the film. I knew this song was copyright free as I had used it before for a promo video with a similar genre to it and no claim was ever made against the video, and claims are always made almost instantly after posting. The end of the song is where it returns to a very soft piano piece, which is very creepy and good for a thriller. It sounds a little like horror, but, with some cinematic boom sounds it can become more of a thriller and is a good place to put the title of the film and the legal information.

Sound Effects:

I used the download link in the description of the video as there are lots of free professional sound effects that I can use in our trailer to make it sound even better as audio is a huge part of a trailer becoming more professional. There are a range of sounds in this video that I can use such as bass booms and effects that I can sync actions shots with to make it sound more like an action trailer and less horror.

This next video gave me a download link for lots of great sound effects that I can use in our trailer for any gunfire during our action sequences, all the sound effects are really high quality and again continue to add to our professional audio that we are trying to achieve for our trailer. having professional audio is one of the easiest things to achieve and it improves the overall quality of the trailer quite a lot.

I used this final video in order to get all of the fighting sound effects that I would need for our film as we have a lot of action sequences to put into the end of the trailer and fight scenes are almost always in an action trailer so these sound effects will definitely be necessary to our trailer. Again, I found professional sounding effects that would increase the professionalism of our final edit, giving the false impression of a high productions value.

Ancillary Task 1 - Teaser Poster

The poster I decided to create for our feature film was a teaser poster based on Taken 2 as First Arrest's genre and plot relates closely to Taken 2, so it was a good film to reference. I used the idea of having very minimal text from the Taken 2 poster and copied the kind of text that could be seen such as the title, release date and distribution company. The rest of the poster was entirely related to the film and was just an image of the protagonist with no more text and so the rest of my poster is just images about the film itself. I came up with the idea to blend two shots together, one of the protagonist and one of the antagonist and I used the contrast in the black and white backdrops to show their roles in the film. Using a soft box light I only lit the antagonist from one side to give the impression that the light from the protagonist is spilling over and creating an ominous effect on him. I merged the two together in one image to make the poster very dramatic and show that there are two sides to the story of a first arrest, the pride of an officer and the ruined life of a convict. It helps to keep the plot open as nothing is given away other than the two main characters, there are no details as to what could happen but the style of the poster helps to build hype for the film. The red text and dark style of photography is very similar to a thriller genre and so the audience would be able to guess the genre of the film from the poster. However, there is some action in the trailer, and our genre is considered to be an action thriller, but, there are no guns, weapons or anything to suggest action in the poster. From my researched posters below I used the conventions that can be found in them in order to plan and construct my own product. These conventions included, dark lighting, lots of shadows, red and grey text and making the protagonist the clear subject of the image. I decided to make my poster a teaser poster as i liked the simplistic style of the Taken 2 teaser poster (left) and so I decided to use this minimal style of text in my own work.

Ancillary Task 2 - Magazine Front Cover

For my second ancillary task I chose to do a magazine front cover that was based around our film. The research I conducted was of two popular magazines 'Empire' and 'Total Film' but Empire was the main influence for my own magazine and I used a number of conventions from their magazine covers. The style of the title and all of the surrounding information was taken influence from Empire but is also a convention of all film magazines to have all of this information in the same area. Also, having the head of the actor/actress overlapping the title is a clear convention of all magazine front covers and so this is something that I included in my own front cover. The style of the text which gives an overview of the kind of articles that are going to be in this issue follow the conventions of both Total Film and Empire by making the film title stand out and having the title of the article less so. Again, I didn't want to just copy one magazines conventions so I used components that can be found in both Total Film and in Empire and using a bar with images to show what kind of movies are going to be included to give viewers a very quick insight into the issue and if they see a film they like, they are more enticed to buy the magazine. The main title of the film fits with the synergy of the brand 'First Arrest' the style of the text is the same that is used in the trailer, main film, poster and on anything else that uses the film's title. The is something that all film's do on magazine front covers and on all products and content that involve that film's title. Finally, the colour scheme of the magazine is all of very similar colours, which, again, is a convention of magazine front covers to keep to a very minimal colour schemes.