Storyboard comparison

We came up with this idea to compare our storyboard to our final trailer. This will help when we evaluate our trailer, so we can see how our original developed over time. It was interesting to compare our initial ideas to the trailer after a long time.

Magazine Development and Final

After researching magazine covers from Empire and Total Film, it was time to create our magazine cover. 

We started with the pictures that we had taken for our poster, and decided to use different ones from last time. This was the one we went with, after cutting out the background.

We decided to use a similar effect as the poster, with Luke in the foreground and Max in the background and more transparent. We gave both an outer glow, Luke's was white to show that he was the good character in the film, and Max's was black to suggest that he would be a villain. 

We originally went with the working title, HYDC Magazine, but we were advised that it might be weird that our production company was the same as our magazine.

We gave the title a black stroke and put the word magazine into HYDC.

We decided to change the name to Focus, originally because the featured film would be 'focused' on, but we also realised that focus could also apply to filming techniques such as focus pulls, so it is ambiguous. 

We also put a texture on the gradient and gave the title a cyan outer glow instead.

The next step was to add the name of the film, which we did with the same style as the masthead. We also added a tagline and a 'world exclusive' stamp.

We also noticed that some of our magazine influences had other articles on the front, so we added a small sample on the right hand side of the cover and at the bottom, as well as a banner along the top which shows another article.

This is our final magazine.

Trailer Feedback Survey

Magazine Research

We have been looking at Magazine covers from Empire and Total Film to get some inspiration for our own magazine cover, we believe we will make a Total Film magazine cover, mainly because we prefer the title and the type of cover they make.

Here are some examples of posters we want to replicate;

These magazine covers are from Empire and Total Film. We want to create our own magazine and name so we don't have to fit into a certain style, yet uses features of these ones.

Poster Development and Final

Before we had our pictures, we decided to make a template. This consisted of the actor's names and the title itself.

For the background, we gave a simple gradient - grey to black. We gave the title some motion blur in the background to add depth. Also, the production logos were added in the bottom left hand corner.

The next step was to add the credits below the title, so we copied the text from the credits we used in our trailer and pasted them underneath the title and adjusted the settings so it was aligned and structured correctly.

We also added a small gradient under the actor's names so they could contrast more and stand out.

These are some of our pictures we managed to take.

Once we had uploaded our pictures, it was time to crop them.

We used the magnetic lasso tool which was effective because there was high contrast between the clothes and the background. Before we put them in the poster, we auto adjusted the tone, contrast and colour so the image would look more flat.

First, we decided to frame Luke and adjust the cropping which was needed in places. We did Luke first because he is the main subject of the poster.

Our idea to frame him like this is based off of several of our influences; Quantum of Solace and Die Another Die.

Once we added Max, we decided that he needed to be transparent, so his image was very subtle in the background, we also placed his picture on the layer below Luke's.

This transparency works well, as initial attention is drawn towards Luke, then Max. We also used another gradient to blend him into the background, so it was more smooth.

After a few more image adjustments and croppings, we decided it was time to add a quote on the poster.

We used white with a white outer glow to highlight the quote and place emphasis on it. At this stage, we also adjusted the title and added outer glows to both Luke and Max.

This is the final version of our poster, with some changes made based on the feedback we received.

We added a tagline just above the title, which is in a different text so it is clear that it is not part of the title of the film. We also added the skyline of London in the background for two reasons; so the background had more texture and depth, but to also reveal the location of the film - which we filmed in Elephant & Castle.

Overall, we are both happy with the poster and believe that we took features from our influences and applied them well to our film. We both believe that it reflects the theme well.

Poster influences

Looking at influences for our poster, there are some features we want to find, such as; genre, props, tone, mood, text and theme.

We want to base our poster around a prop, preferably a gun. So we looked on impawards.com to try and find posters that fit this criteria.

                                               

These various posters both fit our genre and use a prop like how we want to. The styles and backgrounds vary, but all feature the gun we want to use. We would prefer to use a handgun, rather than a bigger gun like a shotgun or rifle. A normal feature of action posters is that the main character is the centre and everything else is developed around it.

We also looked at the posters of the films we looked at for our original influences, which were; The Dark Knight/Rises, Looper and Taken. As these were influences for our trailer, we believed that they could be influences for our posters.

Once again, these posters are big influences for us. Each poster has something unique, with different features, styles, techniques and backgrounds. We aim to use one or two features from each poster in the construction of our poster.

Overall, our 5 favourite posters are;

Trailer Feedback

Upon finishing our trailer, Jake and I were eager to get the word out about our trailer, as it is something we have put a lot of time and effort in to, and are very proud of it.

Facebook
On Facebook, Jake and I both posted it, on Jake's post, we got the following reactions (apologies for any profanities)



From this, it seems our friends liked it, with 19 "likes" and comments expressing their liking of it, although it was perceived as humorous to some, we believe this is due to the fact they know us in person, and due to the fact it looks quite stereotypical.

I posted it on Facebook twice, and got a total of 11 different likes, but no comments on it, but it further shows people expressing their liking for it (Including people I might not talk to anymore)

Reddit
I also went to post it on to the popular forum "Reddit", Reddit has hundreds of "Subreddits" of specific discussions, I posted the trailer in the "Teenagers" Reddit, and the response was really great.

"Chicarito:

haha brilliant

Trickboss:

Hah awesome, is the heli-crash from an iOS app?

Hylax_Big:

Dat special effect!

Interestingly_Enough:

This is really well-made. I particularly liked the ending with the bit of comedy; it made it feel like a professional trailer.
Is Media Studies a class at your school? I ask because, in my school system (US), there is a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) academy, and I take Mass Communications there, which is basically a course of all types of media and communications. It's very interesting, and I'm glad to see someone interested in it as well!

markshire:

That was awesome

blusteryeel:

this is actually really funny

Vaetir:

Nice, And a pro tip the noise / sound you can hear from 1;00 could be overlapped by soft classical music, not much work but much professional."

As you can see, the feedback was generally positive, some asked questions, and there was some ways to improve. I felt posting on here was great because it gave us feedback from a different audience who didn't know us, which I felt removed any possible bias we were getting. The only way I feel this could have been more solid feedback was if we got it from a variety of ages groups, but all of these people are Teenagers, but I posted it specifically to them because I felt that if I posted it somewhere else, it might be misunderstood as to what it's supposed to be. Although, along with the positive feedback we once again had someone finding our trailer funny, which we would put back to the fact that it looks like quite a stereotypical trailer.

Along with the feedback we got on Reddit, there is also an upvote/downvote system in which you vote if you like what you see,

As you can see, the results were positive, with 20 upvotes, and only 2 downvotes, showing that even those that did not comment enjoyed it.

YouTube



The reaction on YouTube has also been great, with 342 views currently, with 14 likes to 1 dislike, and 3 comments. Of the 3 comments we did have another person (who we know) call it funny, and we know one of the other people who commented, but the other commenter (who called it amazing) we didn't actually know, so it's all more good feedback.

Overall, the feedback was great, we were given an area to improve (a sound issue) and lots of people have told us it was good, so we are ecstatic with the plethora of comments we received. 

Special effects in the trailer

In our trailer we had two main special effects, we had a petrol station explode and a helicopter crash.

The first was the explosion, I knew I had to use Sony Vegas (which I have at home) to create it the way I wanted to, and I knew I had to find the moment in which our character is off camera.

I then got the earliest frame I could so I could maximise how long I could get the explosion to last, once I had done this, I knew I had to find a green screen explosion and downloaded it from YouTube.

This video provided a lot of explosions so I had quite a choice, I chose one and cut it out and imported it to Sony Vegas (with the video clip).

It then started getting complicated, I added the explosion to the layer above the video clip, and chose the effect FX "Sony Chroma Keyer" this is the Sony Vegas equivalent of a green screen effect.

Once this was done I knew I had to cut out the bridge from the explosion layer, and being fairly inexperienced with Sony Vegas I knew how I wanted to do it, but not how to do it precisely, but I had to use to crop tool (which is more advanced than the iMovie crop tool, and allowed me to crop specific areas) and I knew it would work because it was on a tripod and still.

So to crop it, I had to crop along the explosion, and give an educated guess as to where the bridge would be in relation to the explosion, looking back I realised I could have cropped out the bridge layer and saved the cropping shape, so it took several attempts to get something I liked, and was accurate.

The helicopter was easier to produce, first we had to film the field, with an idea of the height we had to film it at to look accurate, although we knew it would look fine regardless.

Once we had the field, we also had to download a helicopter green screen, one we had seen earlier whilst browsing YouTube casually, and we thought it would be good in our film for a short action clip.

Then all we had to do was import the two clips into iMovie (Not HD) and drag the green screen clip on to the field clip, and select Green Screen and it produced the final product: