Evaluation Final

                              

                              

                              

                              

Evaluation - Draft Due to Technical Difficulties

I used Prezi to present my evaluation answers as seen below. However, a few time that I came to view my work using this software, it was quite unreliable in terms of wether it would show anything at all or leave certain images and videos unclear to see. For this reason, to make it easier to mark and a lot clearer, I have posted my Evaluation as my final post under the title 'Evaluation Final'. I did this using SlideShare that has worked well for me when completing my trailer analysis' and so my full evaluation will be accessible there.

'Lullaby' Final Trailer

             

      

(Best viewed in 720p HD)

Final Magazine Cover

                                               

Putting Together the Magazine Cover

After editing my chosen image for my magazine cover, I began to bring it all together and pull in all the other important components of a typical magazine. Firstly, to create the white border that is very commonly used on 'Film Comment' magazine issues, that was my inspiration for this ancillary task, by just simply cropping the image to a scale that I was happy with.  To make sure that the picture was the right size to allow the masthead and cover lines to fit, my next step was to create and size the masthead.
I entrained from my research that on the recent issues of 'Film Comment' magazine, the actual two words are placed together as one word, however they are differentiated with two different colours, with the 'Comment' being a colour drawn from the main image to create an overall colour scheme. I found this very effective and so looking at my main image, the obvious colour (as a lot was silhouetted), was a kind of dark gold/dusky colour of the floorboards which stand out. This was the colour I decided to correlate into the title.

After this, I added the cover lines above the masthead in a minimalistic way, which is another main feature of film comment that I really liked. I chose a similar font to the one used within film comment which I kept as the font for all the text on the cover to allow it to look professional and particular to that magazine. I tried to pick cover lines that were recent and the most up to date as possible for the time which is what a typical magazine would also do.

Next, I saved an image of a barcode from the internet to place in the right hand bottom corner, as this looked aesthetically more professional and also this is where the majority of bar codes are placed on film comment issues. Another typical feature I added to go with the barcode was the price and the date of the issue.
This is what my final result.

The last stage I had to do to bring the whole magazine together was to write a main cover line to anchor my main image. I know from experiences of reading magazines, that there is usually a play on words which related both to the theme and the image and so I researched further to gain inspiration for how I should go about doing this. I wanted to further tie in the colour scheme and set out to make a small section of the text that same gold/dusky colour that I used on the masthead. I finally came up with 'Into the Darkness/Holly Radford in/The spine chilling/Lullaby'. As the image was mainly silhouetted and our storyline is held in a haunted apartment, I thought 'into the darkness' was a good phrase to bring this feel together and these were the words I decided to make coloured.

Overall I found this process quite easy due to my past experience with photoshop, however the tricky and tedious part that I found difficult and time consuming was creating and colouring the masthead.

Magazine Cover Feedback

Created with Padlet

Putting Together the 'Lullaby' Poster

After preparation and producing a image base for my poster, I began to put it all together. The first step was to create a billing block, a very common feature to most film posters, for the bottom of the poster (the most commonly used space for this component), by opening up another photoshop document. I decided to start by doing this as I knew exactly where I wanted it to go and it wouldn't impact where other elements where to be placed. I found a template online that allowed me to just simply personalise the writing to suit our own film by filling in the gaps with our names. I then downloaded the typical font used for the billing block. I was going to make the background of the billing block transparent, however I realised that the bottom of my poster already was predominantly black and so filled the background black to fit with this. Having the background black also meant that the writing would stand out/contrast that I decided to turn white as this is the typical colour choice (this evident from my previous research).

Obviously I could only use Zoe and I as the names as we were the only ones who created the trailer, with the exception of Ellie and Holly's name that we used for the actresses. However, this looks unusual for a billing block as there are usual a lot more production names that appear on here.

The next step was adding film festival logo's. I did this as our trailer would most probably be an independent film and these types of festivals, such as Tribeca and Cannes are sometimes a huge success for film advertisement. To effectively fit in with the colour scheme of my poster I inverted the colours as seen here, either side of the text. I achieved this by googling the logos, opening them up in Photoshop and making the background transparent. I then inverted the colours so they would go from white to black and vice-versa with the text. I placed them onto the bottom of my poster to finalise the billing block section, which is a common place for logo's like this to go.

Through research, I had found that quite a lot of posters included a couple of the main actors' names that starred in the film featured along the top. Although this may not be as common in independent film posters, I thought that it was effective component to draw attention to the poster for people that may know the actors quite well if they have starred in other favourite movies of theirs. After consideration I decided to add the two names of our actresses "Eleanor Bray" and "Holly Radford"to the top band of the poster and I felt like this completed the overall look and composition of the poster. I also made these names in white as well to contrast against the dark background. My decision to make the rest of the writing white on the poster was to allow only the main title 'Lullaby' to be in red to draw together the colour of Ellie's lip colour, connoting danger and alarm. This makes the title one of the main components of the poster which is what brands the trailer overall.

Next , I added the most important component, the main title/heading; 'Lullaby'. I created my own font  for this and added effects to make it look more distressed and smoked for a eerie feel. To do this I firstly turned the background of the font transparent and used the 'art history brush' tool to scratch some of the font away around the edges to distress it, before I then went to Filter>Blur>Radial Blur. I could then adjust the settings to be as smoked out as I wanted on top of the distressing. I was left with this overall outcome which I am really pleased with as I feel gives it a ghostly feel which fits with our storyline.

The final touch I added was a date of release. This convention or 'Coming Soon' are very common of movie posters and so I added this underneath the billing block. I used the pipette tool to get almost the same colour of the main title to maintain the colour theme. Here is my final poster that I produced;