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:

Our finished trailer

This is the final version of our trailer, uploaded to YouTube.

We plan to post the link to websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to receive feedback from a wide source.

Progress Report v4

We have finished a marathon session of editing, and believe that what we have now is worthy to hand in. Tomorrow we will do adjustments to sound and make fine tuning to the timing and length of clips.

Here is a summary of our day;

- Jake filmed for an hour and a half with Nathan and Pip. This was mostly for the action sequences but also included a few retakes. Sean later joined in and was involved in a few shots.

- We both went to Media at 10.50 to start importing, which took until 13.00.

- We managed to edit for about 20 minutes before Jake had another lesson, but Joe stayed and put everything in the time line, so we had a framework for the next few hours.

- At 14.10, we had a Media lesson and started by adjusting a lot of the timing and adding the soundtrack.

- In the end, we stayed behind editing until about 18.00. In this time; we sorted out the sound, syncing the clips and the soundtrack, creating our final title and adjusting audio levels.

Progress Report v3

Today, we filmed the remainder of our footage, which included action shots, dialogue and retakes. Importing took over 2 hours, but all of our clips are ready to start editing now. We plan to stay after school for a few hours so we don't have to panic on deadline day.

Progress Report v2

Over the past weekend, we managed to film all of our footage from the warehouse. We feel like the shots are good, and will start editing promptly.