Getting used to Final Cut Express

At the beginning of the year we produced a music video for the song "The Show" by the artist Lenka. This acted as a preliminary task for us as we were completely new to mac software. I am glad of the practice and experience that we gained from this exercise because now I feel like when we go to produce our trailor, if we come accross any problems, we will be able to sort them out much more quickly than we would have been able to if we had no experience at all. In particular we had worked out how to add the animation to our music video which was a nice touch. We did this by having to create a gif. file on photoshop, and then editing the speed in final cut so that it fit in with the music.

Final Film Poster

Now that we have finished our poster, I am pleased with the outcome. At first we were going to have the chess as a solid object, but by making it more transparent, it adds the effect that there's something weird about the chess and because it blends into her face, which works well because we know that it is going to be effecting her life and gives the impression that the chess might even be in her mind. This should draw the audience in as there is still the attraction of a female actress, but she also looks quite haunted, but also not very scared, as if she is about to put up a fight against what ever it is that's going to happen to her. 

I am happy with the choice to keep the poster in black and white as it also adds to the mood of the main character and genre of the film. This colour scheme does also link with our magazine cover, and the blood red colour of the title and due date of the film stands out against the greys, blacks and whites and also suggests danger, which also links with the genre of our film. We chose to use this font because it is bold and also is quite sophisticated which chess sometimes has connotations of. We did consider using a font that was slightly more picturesque but we decided that this would add too much detail to the poster, and we wanted the main pictures to stand out against everything else.

In terms of creating a different sort of poster, we didn't really have any ideas because when we came up with this, we all really liked the idea. We have developed it a bit as before, one side of her face was meant to be more dark than it is, and also as I said above, the chess was going to be solid. This poster works better though as it looks more professional and also has more depth to it. However, I don't think that our billing block looks as professional as it could, as the text, although in the same font as the title of our film, doesn't look like a proper billing block and in places the text could have been closer together.

Final Magazine Cover

This is our final Magazine Cover. We have added a lot more writing, in different sizes and colours to the original lot of text that we had on our magazines.  

The background of our chosen photograph is quite busy but we decided that this works better than our pictures with a plain background because it makes it more apparent that she is in character and also adds to the sense of panic that she is portraying. Her open neck shows the vulnerability of her character and the blurriness of the image, including her face adds to the sense of movement, which promotes our film genre quite well.

We did discuss using an actress on the front cover rather than the character because of the fact that we have an interview with the actress, but on further research of other magazine covers, the majority seem to have a picture of the character. I think that we made a good choice having a character on our magazine, especially as the actress is not famous, so the picture of her as herself may not promote the film as well as an in-character shot might. However, this was a hard choice because the character is not wearing a distinctive outfit as this is a contemporary film, so we knew that if we chose to have the character on the front cover, we would have to make sure that it was obvious that it was the character and not the actress. This is why i think that the background of the shot works well as it is clear that it is a scene from the film.

I am happy with the colour scheme as it accurately reflects some of the real life film magazines. If we would have chosen a pink font it would have been more like a magazine aimed at teenagers, this is also why our font is more pointed and square, rather than a rounded font.  

Film Magazine Drafts

This is one example of our magazine drafts. I liked this picture because although origionally I didn't want Megan to be in character, as we had decided to advertise the magazine with an interview with the actress, so I thought it would be better to have a picture of the actress, rather than the character. However, this picutre stood out to me as it showed to some extent the mental state that the character of our film ends up in. In comparison to the magazine cover above, this magazine, although also in character, did not work for me. This is because when I look at it, I don't think that she looks sad enough, her eyes look too happy for someone who's meant to be going crazy and whos makeup is smeered all over her face. We then tried this picture without the bad makeup, which Ella and Laura edited in photo shop. This worked well as a picture for the actress, but I still did not like it as much as I thought it was a bit too fashion magazine. 

Poster Drafts

 These are our poster drafts. Although the image of the white chess is not our own, we will be taking a picture of our own piece. This is just so that we can see what it looks like and if the effect what we want works, which I think it does. We did look at the picture without the chess, but I thought that with out it, it takes away the importance of the chess, which also links in with our title "Checkmate". To begin with I edited the image on photo shop to make her skin look more smooth and also to sharpen her eyes and lips. However, once we started putting the poster together on Power Point,

we started to play about with the "recolour" tool. These are the colours we liked the most, and I think I prefer the poster in black and white to in colour as it makes the writing of the title stand out, and it also creates more of an atmosphere to the poster. The one that I think I prefer is the last poster draft as I think that the contrast works to create more sincerity and makes Megan look more scary, as if the audience are meant to fear her. After taking lots of photographs, we decided that this was the best image to use because Megan is crying, which gives

the audience a clue as to what the film is going to be like, and also she is looking into the camera, which communicates with the audience, which should hopefully encourage people the watch the film. We are going to produce the final poster on photo shop so that we can create more of a shadow over her face, and also so that we can edit our own image of the chess onto the poster. The billing block took a while as each name had to be in individual text boxes to make moving them around more easy. We also looked at real billing blocks and realised that we needed to put the logos from the companies involved with the production along the bottom. We then had to find these images on the internet and make sure that they were slightly transparent, along with the rest of the text, so that the billing block doesn't distract from the actual poster, as the text is in red. The date is not in red because otherwise it would blend in too much with the billing block, and it wouldn't stand out.