Developing my Movie Poster: Layout

Developing my Movie Magazine: Layout

This is the planned layout for my magazine, and is subject to alterations as i take my photos

Movie Magazine Ideas

I have planned to make my magazine cover for my magazine have considerable influences from the likes of Empire and Total Film. The cover will feature the standard conventions of magazine covers for example it will feature a masthead, headline and tagline and others. I am likely to base the overall issue more on Empire as they are more popular and recognisable, but also due to the way they use their mast head in conjunction with the main image. 

Movie Poster Ideas: The Shot

I am planning to have one of two shots for my poster, both of which feature the main villain. The first of which will be a shot of the villains mask in the centre with blood dripping on it. This is symbolic of the type of slasher film that is being made, with a common technique of the masked and silent villain apparent here. The second shot i have planned is one of the villain at a low angle holding his miniature chainsaw with blood on, set in the backdrop of a dark alleyway.

Podcast Practice

Here me, Zhongwei Zhao and Kyle Dos Santos created a model podcast to give an idea for how a podcast can be used to answer a evaluation question. In this podcast script, we answered the question,

"How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? "

Podcast Script

Research Stage (Kyle)

While researching, I used Apple Macs and YouTube to improve my knowledge of conventions within horror trailers. I watched the trailers and studied the way that they used conventions, such as low angle shots to establish power, which I eventually used in my trailer. Before creating my trailer, I created a music video to familiarise myself with the Canon camera and the iMovie app, both of which would be used in the filming and eventual editing of my trailer. I used the website Blogger as a resource to record all of this research as this would ensure all my information would be in one place. I used Google Chrome to access any necessary online research, as Google is the search engine that I am most familiar with.

Planning Stage (Zhong): For my planning I started with a storyboard and created a draft story on paper, and then further developed it in I-Movie. In I-Movie it allowed us to model each frame, for example how long the shot was going to be and allowed us to add text to explain what that shot was going to be. I have planned a few different locations to film in at the start I was considering to record at. The first area that I came up with was central park, but I realised that the location was unsuitable as it was not dense enough in trees to accurately represent a forest. Furthermore, the second area I have looked at is the tower grounds, this was suitable for my film because my film is mainly set in a forest. Due to the fact that it takes us time to walk to tower grounds I have mostly planned Saturdays to go filming as we don’t have much time to get there during the school day.

Construction Stage (Jamie)

The Camera that was used when shooting the film was a Canon camera. This was an expensive camera, and therefore this led to a decent quality of image, which helps when trying to make a decent horror trailer, or any trailer for that matter. When it came to the editing of the film, I used I-movie for Mac OS, which gave me several tools in which to enhance my film. Firstly, I incorporated different filters in order to improve the look of certain shots. For example, there is a brief action shot that when editing, looked too bright for the type of trailer I am creating, which is horror. So I decided to use the filters in order to make the shot more appropriate, eventually choosing the sci-fi filter, which worked in my trailer. Another tool I used was the text tool, which was really useful in creating elements of the trailer that are considered conventions, such as the title of the movie at the end and the cast list. This tool proved to really useful as I could change the font from a comic style to one that more appropriately suits my genre of film. Overall the progress I made in construction was made possible by my research on trailer conventions and their features, as well as my planning by learning how to effectively use I-movie.

Movie Poster Ideas: Text

When adding text to my poster, i will add colours that stand out well from the black background. I will use red text for my title as it keeps a sense of continuity with the film itself, as the colour there is also red, as it will also be on my magazine. A continued use of the same fonts and colours makes a film more recognisable and this is what i am doing with the font/colours. The red text is also used often in horror movie posters as red is a colour that symbolises blood and danger, hence why slasher films use this often, due to their abundance of blood and gore.

Movie Poster Ideas: Black background

For the task of creating a movie poster, i am looking at representing the film's dark tone on the poster, with a black background likely to be used, as this suits the tone of the film well. The black background also works to serve other text on the poster and the main image, which will pull more of the viewers attention than t would do with a distracting background. Examples of this being used in movie posters include:
The Silence of the Lambs

Scream 4