Grow Your Own Trailer

 We chose to create a shot that would seem as if ‘Michael’ is stamping on someone’s head as a group we thought this would work well as it would keep the audience in suspense. When filming this we put the camera on the floor to capture a worm view shot. This shot represents our film extremely well as it clearly portrays a lot of violence. I feel the location that we chose worked really well as it was a quite dark room with a few tools placed in the room, we chose this location as we felt it could show the audience that the ‘gangsters’ are undercover and hide the dirty work that the do very well. Whilst editing this shot as a group we felt that maybe we should emphasise the violence as our trailer didn’t really include a lot, we done this by adding a slow motion effect to the end of the shot this worked really well as it almost showed the heartlessness of Michael whilst he is stamping on someone head. Although as a group we where very pleased with this shot we all agreed that if we where to re create the shot we would add in a little more like also we agreed we would try a point of view shot so  this would mean Michael would need to stamp on the camera instead of the floor.



 
To make this shot work, one member of the group had to lay in the boot of the car to create a point of view shot, we decided to take Michael out the shot to keep the audience guessing what had happened and also to make the audience think that Michael was the one in the boot. In the shot we asked ‘Jimmy’ (the main character) to hold the spade so that once again it would link back to our magazine cover and our film title. I feel this shot works well as it portrays the actors as stereotypical gangsters as they look as if they have a lot of power they also look intimidating. Another reason we chose to create a shot like this was to create a sense of status, as the boys are clearly looking into a person/body in the boot this creates different levels of status also by the way they are standing as jimmy is holding the shovel this shows he clearly hold the most power within the group. When it came to editing this shot to fit our trailer we decided that this shot would fit in nicely before the title appears as it is like as soon as the boot shuts the title appears. If I was to recreate the shot I might have the other boys in the background to give jimmy a superior look.



This shot in particular we felt would work well at the very end of our trailer before the billing block appears it is a strong head shot and unlike other shots from earlier in the trailer shows the destruction of the characters, and how things go wrong, it works as a narrative because earlier shots worked as an equilibrium where the gangster characters have power and then this shot emphasises a disequilibrium where things have gone wrong and the main character may just give up. Once again this shot links to one of the magazine covers we created. I feel that this shot worked really well within the film. if i was to re create this shot i think it would have worked better if it was a full body shot.

Evalutation Starter

After completing our movie trailer, poster and magazine front cover I am extremely please with the effort and dedication my group and I have put into producing them. I can honestly say although at times getting the group together and having the motivation to complete the tasks I have really enjoyed creating our finished products. After watching our movie trailer complete and on the big screen I feel I can take pride in the hard work I have put in. from the start my group and I knew that these tasks would be stressful and a challenged but now we can look back and say we are glad we worked so hard. From the beginning choosing the right genre was vital to us as the whole group had to agree, we all decided we wanted to do something unique so that ruled out genres such as thrillers or comedy’s. Our original thought was to create a romantic film trailer but after a lot of research we decided this would be quite hard to achieve the best possible outcome so After watching lots of different trailers on YouTube and getting inspiration from a range or resources we decided upon a theme, Gangster and Crime. One of the hardest parts involving this genre was finding the actors to star in the film as we needed to find a group of five boys that looked fairly old so that they could fit the roles they would be given. After we found a reliable group of boys we then just had to arrange a date that we could all meet on so that we could start filming. When it came to this our communication wasn’t great so we did have to re schedule a couple of times but in the end we worked together and got the footage that we needed.

Audience Feedback

After creating our film trailer, our media poster and magazine cover we decided we would benefit from gaining feedback from our target audience. We posted our video onto YouTube and Facebook. After uploading our film we received a lot of positive feedback. When showing different audiences our magazine covers they stated that both magazines worked well but chose which one they preferred, we where lucky enough to have appealed to the target audience that we had hoped for.

Here are some of the comments we recieved.

As a class we took time out to analyse each other’s films, magazine front cover and poster and give some negative and positive feedback. Whilst listening to this feedback I found it very useful and noted down all of the things we could improve on in the future. We were pleased to see that we got a lot of positive feedback as we felt our hard work paid off. We also accepted constructive criticism and spoke about the pros and cons of our trailer with the rest of the class.

Some of the positive feedback consisted of-

• shots are extremly clear and not shakey
• music works brilliantly
• intersting layout on the poster
• it is quite short making you want to see what happen

Some of the constructive criticism consisted of-

• not enough fast cuts
• transitions could be better
• not enough violence shown

After collecting all of our feedback we decided to put all information into a pie chart to see how well our product worked and the ratio between positive and negative feedback.

 

Media Technologies

PHOTO SHOP

When creating our film poster and magazine we decided as a group photoshop would be the best programe to use. We thought this would be best as two of the members in our group have used it before for other subjects, this meant that we where able to create our magazine cover and film poster relatively quickly. Below are some print screens of the different steps and techniques we used when creating the magazine.  I do feel that using photoshop was best suited for making these products and gave us the best results possible. As a group i think we would all agree that we would use photoshop again if we had to create our magazine and poster a second time round. 

GARAGE BAND 

As a group we decided the best programme to use to create our music would be garage band, we decided that we wanted to start our music to start off with a slow and mellow tempo and then gradually build to and upbeat tune.  After looking at the Public Enemies trailer soundtrack we were quite inspired and decided to include drum beats and guitars to achieve the sound we were looking for. As none of us in the group had used the programme Garage Band before it took a lot of getting use to but we spent a while experiment with a range of different beats to make sure we got the correct music for our trailer. After we had made our final music as a group we had a discussion and decided although the music worked well we decided to use the some “the beast in me” sang by jimmy Gore who is staring as our main character, we felt this song went better with the trailer as it was not an instrumental, it included words which went well as our trailer has no talking throughout. Although we didn’t use garage band I would still use it in the future as after experimenting with it I now know how it works.



FINAL CUT EXPRESS
In the group we had a choice to use either the programme 'Pinnacle' or 'Final Cut Express'. We had used Pinnacle in the first year of this course and so were familiar with how it works etc. We hadn't had much practice using the Final Cut Express programme, but we were fortunate enough to have a tutorial for the use of the programme which helped us to make a decision on the final programme that would be used. We chose to use the programme Final Cut Express to edit and perfect our film trailor. This programme was a lot easier to use and contained all of the tools and functions that we required to do what we were aiming to do. I feel that the genre we chose was enhanced and justified by the quality of out movie trailor. The transitions and effects that we managed to put in were complimentary to the genre. Difficulties using this programme include the fact that we couldn't insert any form of text using it, and instead we chose to use a programme called Livetype. The use of the extra programme enabled the quality of the trailor to be enhanced, and therefore we were more than satisfied despite this being time consuming.

LIVE TYPE

Live type is the programme we used to create all off our fonts for our trailer as we were unable to create text on final cut express. As a group we felt this was the best programme to use as it gave us a wide variety of fonts, styles, sizes and effects to choose from. Once creating all of our fonts for the film we were extremely pleased with the outcome as  all of our fonts worked really well as we kept the colour and style consistent for all of our titles except for our main title 'Grow Your Own' where we changed the colouring to red as this linked in with our film poster. Overall i do think that live type was an extremely good programme to use and i would defiantly use it again in the future.