Final Products

Film Trailer

Magazine Cover

Poster

This is the final version of our film poster, as you can see we have made a number of changes since we first obtained this photograph. We added a new title which will be used on all three of our media products, this has a slight blur to it that gives it a ghostly feel, again appealing to our genre. We have used a consistent font colour throughout this poster, this is because we believe it contrasts well with the background colour and stands out well. We have also enlarged the size of the tag-line, this is because it was very difficult to see as it was previously and didn't fit in with the other proportions of our poster. We have also added in the text, "In Theaters February 25". We did this to fit the conventions of real film posters, this simply allows us to give our poster a much more professional and realistic feel to it. We have also added in details about the directors, editors, actors and production studios involved in making the media products. We did this, again, to make our film poster look more realistic and more professional. We have also added the names of the actors to the top of the poster, this acts as a kind of skyline. This again appeals to the conventions of our real film posters and utilises the un-used space at the top of the photo. This is so the image does not look empty.

Narrative Theorists

Vladimir Propp

Vladimir Propp developed a character theory for studying media products such as

books, television programs and films, which says that there were 7 main character

types in the stories he studied, these findings can be applied to other media such as

our film trailer.

These 7 character types were:

The villain, who struggles to compete against the hero.

The donor, who prepares the hero or gives the hero some form of object to help them on there way.

The helper, who assists the hero in the quest.

The princess, the person the hero marries, often looked for during the narrative

The princess's father, who the hero must impress in order to win the princess.

The dispatcher, the character who sends the hero off.

The hero reacts to the donor, accepts help from the helper, weds the princess and ultimately defeats the villain.

Propp also stated that any story followed a strict pattern of functions, he states that there are 31 of these functions, they are:

Absentation

Interdiction

Violation of Interdiction

Reconnaissance

Delivery

Trickery

Complicity

Villainy and Lack

Mediation

Beginning Counter-Action

Departure

First Function of the Donor

Hero's Reaction

Receipt of Magical Agent

Guidance

Struggle

Branding

Victory

Liquidation

Return

Pursuit

Rescue

Unrecognized Arrival

Unfounded Claims

Difficult Task

Solution

Recgnition

Exposure

Transfiguration

Punishment

Wedding/Victory

Tzvetan Todorov

Tzvetan Todorov simplified narrative theory while also allowing a more detailed understanding of media products with his idea of Equilibrium and Disequilibrium.

His theory:

• The media piece starts with a state of equilibrium, where everything is as it should be.
• It then suffers some disruption, this is the disequilibrium of the piece.
• New equilibrium is produced at the end of the story-line and normality is restored.

Todorov also states that there are five stages the narrative of a story can progress through, these are:

1. A state of equilibrium (All is as it should be.)

2. A disruption of that order by an event.

3. A recognition that the disorder has occurred.

4. An attempt to repair the damage of the disruption.

5. A return or restoration of a NEW equilibrium

Editing

This is by far the most time consuming section of the whole project. This is because we have to look at all the footage we shot and pick out the best pieces to go into our final film trailer.

After filming all of the footage that we required, we uploaded all of the footage from the video camera onto the media department's iMacs. We are using a program called Adobe Premiere Pro to edit all of our footage. This is a very technical piece of software and allows us to place lighting effects and different transitions between each shot, such as a crossfade and fade to black. The main part of the editing process is cutting a placing all the shots we need, we did this with the "razor" tool on the program. This allows us to cut out what we didn't need and edit the shots that we wanted in our final trailer. Using the software we added our soundtrack and made sure that it was all in time with the shot transition using the select tool. We then created our own title shots with a sentence about the film on each one. We did this by using the built in title editor to choose the colour of our background and the colour, font and general style of the text. We then placed our chosen shot transition effect, dip to black, on a majority of our shots to make the trailer flow smoothly.

Filming Timetable

Filming Timetable

Film Noir Influences

Our film trailer is very dark and mysterious, the lighting is very dreary and dull throughout many of the shots. These are typical conventions of Film Noir. We have purposely darkened some of our shots to give them a film noir feel, for example we have a shot in which the killer is shown as a reflection of a silhouette. This silhouette is very typical of a film noir film as this convention is used in many of these films.

The photo above is a screenshot from a scene in The Big Combo, this is a perfect example of the silhouette shot. This shot has been very influential in many films including ours. This is because the silhouettes look mysterious and they are two very clear figures. This allows the viewer to clearly see some of the features of each figure, but are unable to see some more important details, such as the face. This leaves us wondering why these two people are in silhouettes and what reasoning is behind this. This is how we would like to portray our killer in our trailer, but instead of so mysterious we were looking to portray him as more scary and creepy in order to emphasise the genre of our film.

Mood Board

We made this mood board to show some of the movie posters that gave us inspirations and ideas to add to our movie poster. These films are also relevant to our trailer as they are all of the horror genre and our trailer contains the same characteristics.