Welcome Moderator

ALEX WAIN

CANDIDATE NUMBER : 1779

CLAREMONT FAN COURT SCHOOL 64680

Hello moderator, I worked with Charlie Slorick 1770 and Thomas Hutchinson 1733.

We had to produce a promo package for our film, which included two trailers, a teaser and a proper trailer, a poster, a film website and various social media accounts that would all promote our film. The genre we decided to make our film was a thriller/military/horror style film as we have never experimented with those genre's before.  We believed it to be an interesting, new experience for us. As such we came up with the idea of two military soldiers hunting down a monster and giving it the title 'silhouette' after the fact that the majority of appearances the monster makes is as a silhouette. 

To effectively create the promo pack we needed to research the elements that are needed to create an effective promo pack and to make them as professional as possible. We utilised a large array of creative tools, including adobe photoshop, adobe after affects, and adobe premiere pro. These tools helped us create a professional looking trailer that we would be proud to present as our piece of work.  Another part of the promo pack that I created was the social media, namely an instagram and twitter page. This gave me better insight as to how to create a professional campaign.

Directing

This role was taken up by everyone but I gave a-lot of advice on how to do the camerawork, the angles, the editing, etc. I made sure that the production ran as smoothly as possible and that everyone was happy with any creative decisions made by the crew and the cast. I offered advice as a creative consultant to the cast and crew but allowed the cast to express themselves as they wish, which helped to bring together the entire project.

Editing

Tom took this role due to his prior experience with editing in the production of the film Duty Calls, his prior experience allowed him to correctly understand what would work in any situation and how to go about doing what we, the team, wanted to happen. This helped to create a unique film trailer that only we could produce.

Camerawork

Charlie Slorick took on the role as director of cinematography, his experience with cameras in his Photography A level helped to create the film trailer.  He utilised a variety of camera angles and shot types, including a panning birds eye shot, a close up, follow pan, worms eye view shots and a variety of others. Due to his masterful camerawork we were able to create visually captivating trailers that show off the quality we were able to produce as a team.

Poster

Trailer

Teaser Trailer

Website - link here

social media

TO SEE THE ACTUAL SOCIAL MEDIA PAGE PLEASE CLICK THE PICTURES AND IT WILL TAKE YOU TO THE RESPECTIVE SOCIAL MEDIA PAGE

To make sure that I was able to understand how social media worked and how film companies used them I created two social media accounts on two separate platforms, Instagram, and Twitter. I chose these two platforms because of how popular and commonly used they are in marketing films, some examples being Captain Marvel's social media campaign, as well as the modern Star Wars films.

WEBSITE : Reflections

Firstly, the overall functionality of the website was my favourite part. At the top of the website there were links that would take you to the various different sections, but you could also just scroll down and you would be greeted with the different sections, making it is easy to navigate throughout the website. 

The design of the website was also very successful as there was consistency in its colour pallete. The writing was all in the same font, colour and size, which helped make the website easier to look at for viewers. 

On the festivals section I managed to incorporate a link to the film websites homepage, the links were imbedded in the pictures of the websites logos. This helped to make the website look far more professional and more interactive and engaging to the viewer. 

I also managed to make a behind the scenes photos section. This section would help our viewers get invested as they would see how much work has gone into the film. It showed the variety of locations we had to use to to make our vision of the film work. The gallery also makes our production team more human and relatable as there will be more pictures that will be able to show sneak peaks into the film.

Finally, I also incorporated the same technique of imbedded images and made two social media links that would take you to my Twitter and Instagram page respectively. This would increase the chances of the viewer being able to keep up with the production of the film and the trailer. 

TRAILER : Changes

For our trailer we decided that we would give our film a blue colour wash to help give off a colder, harder vibe for the film. This meant that we could create a much more creepy, offputting feel for the film trailer and draw in our audience much more effectively.  The colour grading was done in Premier Pro, and we adjusted the entire film trailer at once as opposed to adjusting it on a scene by scene basis, which helped to enforce the continuity of the trailer.

The camerawork was sometimes shaky, but to reduce the shaky affect that the footage had we employed the smooth stabilisation effect. This helped to make the film trailer easier on the eyes and make the trailer more visually appealing when watching it as the viewer would be able to focus on the characters.

To create the paranormal effect that we were going for we used special effects in Premier Pro, helping give the illusion of our monster flying, and making it look much more believable.  It helped my project to look more professional as the special effects cojoined with the usage of the colour grading helped to make the monster look much more menacing and dangerous than it would have looked without them.

Before colour correction:

After colour correction

TRAILER : Edits

In order to edit our project we used Adobe Premire Pro, an editing software developed by adobe to help edit footage for filmmakers. This helped us keep track of and easily update our work when necessary. 

For the special effects Adobe After Affects was used to help make visually appealing special effects that didn't stick out too much. This meant that we could add more to our project in post production, this included a keep out sign that was added with CGI later on.

To create the Silhouette logo and to cut out the image of our monster, played by Amy, we used Adobe Photoshop due to its ease of use and large variety of editing options available to us to help us create the image that we wanted to make.

Adobe After Affects has a useful feature that allows us to identify the best positions to add images and edits in post production later on called "3D camera tracker" this allowed us to use the image and the colouring to help create a realistic image of our monster in the sky, which fed into the creepy, paranormal style we were attempting to create for our project.

POSTER : Refinements

For my film poster I went through a vast array of redesigns with the one below being my final design. The refinements that I did for this poster included increasing the contrast of the colours, which allowed the purple/pink light to really pop alongside the green colour of the refraction of light caught by the camera. 

It also allowed for the finer details of the characters to show much easier, as seen with the shadows created by the soldier's clothing in the poster below. It then allowed for the poster to be much more appealing to look at as the colour choices were easy on the eyes and still looked unique enough to grab passerby's attention.

I added the Instagram and Twitter logo to add professionalism to my poster and make it look more like an actual movie poster. The white colour of the logos follows the continuity of the poster and helps the poster to blend by following the present colour scheme.

CONSTRUCTION : Promotional T-shirt

To promote our film brand I made a shirt that has the brand image of the soldier with the purple flash over the eye on the front. This promoted the brand as our film is targeted to a younger audience and t-shirts are a form of attire that are commonly worn by the younger generation, predominantly teenagers. This serves as evidence to support that a t-shirt would be the best form of merchandise to use for most efficient promotion to our target audience.

CONSTRUCTION : Filming 2 - News Reporter

To start our film we decided that it would be best to open with a news report as it would set the narrative and provide enough information to grab the audience's attention without jumping straight into the action immediately.  This will help provide enough information for the film to make sense but isn't as simple as an exposition dump through a textual opening, such as Star Wars. 

We used a greenscreen to allow us to the edit the footage in post production and make it seem that this is an actual news report. Using the ultra key in Adobe Premier Pro we could cut the subject of the frame cleanly, allowing us to edit the background to look more like a newsplace. 

To make sure that the sound was as good as we could make it we utilised the external microphone available in the media room. This allowed us to capture the best sound we could and help the news report look more professional.

Another technique that we used was clapping before starting filming, so that way we could keep the camera on until we finally got the best shot for our film. The clap served as a marker for where each batch of filming started and ended, the clap showed as a very high frequency on the soundwaves, showing precisly where the clip starts and ends which we could then use in post productioon to cut the section we needed and delete the rest.

So we decided that we would do a news report to start the film, this would work as it would provide information to the viewer to help the short time we have to tell our story flow easier. The footage that we captured is shown below.