WEEK 14 – w/c 03/01/11 (Ancillary 1)

This week I will start creating my 1st ancillary project which is a promotional poster to endorse the movie that me and my partners are creating a trailer for.

The first plan of action was to go out and get my base pictures for the poster, so I contacted my partners so that we could meet outside of college to retrieve some afterhours shots. I decided that I wished to take the pictures at night using my 12.2 megapixel Samsung PL100 camera.

Despite the small space that the poster would be made of I wished to make it so that when someone looks at the poster image they would immediatly understand what the surroundings of the settings are like (urbanized areas) and the type of people that would be in the film which are young adults from lower class background.

These are a few of the images that i captured this week: 

WEEK 13 – w/c 13/12/10 (Ancillary 1)

This week I have started working on my 1st Ancillary project which is a promotional poster for the film that me and my partners are making a teaser trailer for.

To start off I am going to research promotional posters relevant to my genre and analysee them.

From examing these posters among others that relate to my movie trailer's genre i noticed a few common aspects between them which are as follows:

• They usually have a centrepiece picture of the main protagonist/antagonist of the film.
• The subject of the picture is usually posed in an intimidating posture.
• There is enough lighting in the picture to bring out the shadows and makes the subject look more like a sillhouette.
• These pictures almost have a mistly/smokey look to them.
• The important text for the horror/slasher movie posters e.g. the title, release date are often coloured red which has strong connotations to blood which is to be expected in the film.
• I also noticed that most of the posters (not just horror movie posters) have a common layout of the credits text being centred at the bottom with the title and tagline just above it and miscellaneous items at the far bottom.

WEEK 12 – w/c 06/12/10

This is the first draft trailer that me and my partners have submitted for the UK version of the teaser trailer.

As this is just the draft version it was missing quite a lot of vital parts that make a teaser trailer. however by showing it to our colleagues we were able to receive some feedback. These are the main things that were addressed after we told our colleagues not to hold back on their creative criticism:

• That there was no title graphics.
• There no release date.
• That there was only 1/2 a minutes worth of footage.
• Some of the acting did not look real enough.

However we did receive some good comments as well:

• A lot of people especially liked the last close up shot of a black man's eyes in the dark, but with some ambient light that made him look sinister.
• They liked the cuts to different shots for the same scene e.g. the gang members running from the car park.
• The varied use of interior and exterior locations for shots.
• The different angles in which these shots were taken.

WEEK 11 – w/c 29/11/10

One of the main things that my teaser trailer is integral parts that my teaser trailer is missing is the catchy part that usually occurs just before the end of most teaser trailers. these scenes might have a catchy phrase or something that will happen that is basically put in to catch the viewer's attention and make them want to come and see the film. An example of this is Sorority Row.

The catchy bit being the scene just before the release date is shown at the end.

WEEK 10 – w/c 22/11/10

This week i have been concentrating on the trailer sounds that that set the mood for the movies because i have noticed from watching films that if the music is muted then the scare factor of the film drops drastically there was also a vital part that was vital to make my trailer a truly complete horror movie trailer and that was the horror movie trailer noises which play when scenes are transitioned. However i had a problem and this problem was that when i tried to find out what these noises were called in order to download them i could not so this was also were my improvisational skills came into play.

First i went to youtube.com and searched for various recent horror movie trailers e.g. Nightmare on Elm St., i then proceeded to copy the url and put it in an online youtube audio to mp3 converter on http://www.listentoyoutube.com/

Once it was converted i opened the file in a audio editing software that i downloaded called Wavepad Sound Editor and then picked and grabbed the pieces of it that i needed.

Here is the list of the sound effects that i sliced, some of them i had to change the pitch on to meet my need.

WEEK 9 – w/c 15/11/10

(post-production: introduction to video-editing or re-drafting layouts)

This week i have been starting to edit my shots on Adobe Premiere.

I have started to create an ident for my teaser trailer which is the approx. 10 sec animation that shows at the

 beginning of most teaser trailers. I first had to look up examples of these, some of which are shown below.

Through the combined use of Adobe Photoshop to create the base graphic and Adobe Flash to animate it, i created my own personalized movie production ident for the teaser trailer, i also distributed the base logo to my partners for them to use in their Ancillary Movie Poster.

This animation will play at the beginning of my teaser trailer just after the MPAA Green screen is shown.

WEEK 8 – w/c 08/11/10

I have been applying the angles and shots from some of the scenes of films from similar genres to my product as i go along in a veriety of ways, an example of this is hown below:

This is the trailer for the 2011 film called Attack the Block, this film is similar to what my one is based around seeing as it is also British and being set in South London, centres around the hood aspect however unlike my trailer which is a slasher/horror, this film is more sci-fi. From this trailer i caught an idea from the shot where the protagonist swereves his head when he hears the door being slammed by aliens and combined it with an idea from the trailer below.

This is the trailer for Eden Lake a 2008 British thriller Film which connects more to my product in terms of genre and storyline however not so much in terms of scenery. The idea that i took from this trailer was also related to the banging on the door closing towards the end.

The first shot has already been edited, it was recorded with my cousin's Canon 7D Camera inside of his house in Woodpecker Estate, New Cross, South East London. I went through the trouble of borrowing a painted BB Gun from one of my friends to use as a prop, i tried to use the contents of a teabag as fake cannabis but it did not work out properly and ended up falling out onto the floor, and i got his help to give the shot a sort of really light sepia tone using his Mac to make it seem more dank and gritty. The scene is supposed to show the suspected protagonist waiting for the killer to come for him.

This is the continuation of the previous shot that has not been edited yet and was shot in my house using my Samsung PL100 12.2 Megapixel camera. This shot will be cut down and have sound effects added to it to make it seem as if the suspected protagonist is alerted by someone banging the door.

This is one of the shots that i will edit and use in the final product to make up a scenario similar to the ones shown in the trailers at the top.