Post Production: Draft Two

After looking through Internet images of any influential poster ideas, I managed to collect a few conventions of a poster. The films I looked at were True Grit (2010), Casino Royale (2006), Inglorious Basterds (2009) and The Dark Knight (2008).

I used these posters to get an idea of how a teaser poster looks in terms of, layout, font, size of text, design and colour. Each poster individually helped me create the teaser poster with the suitable conventions of a teaser in place.

In terms of development we worked as a team to portray a poster as effective as possible with the equipment we had. From the draft one to our final draft, there are noticeable improvements to the quality of work.

As we tried different images, we realised it is crucial to maintain the idea of being a 'teaser'. Therefore we needed to make sure that little information was given away and keep the design of the poster neat. After looking through more posters we had an attraction to making the image of John Walters a shadow. As an editor this task was challenging as I had to cut out John Walters character and expose the shadow clearly. To do this I masked off section of the characters body, and had erased it. This appeared rigid and messy, so I used a range of tools to blur, burn and smudge areas. These tools blended pixels together, therefore reducing the rigid appearance and creating a bold outline. In addition to this I manipulated the image itself, adding darkness by adjusting the contrast and brightness.

Post Production: Draft One

To create the poster I used the graphic editing software Adobe Photoshop CS3. As the CS3 version isn't the newest product Adobe had made, it was easier to get different tutorials because of how long it has been in use. Also I found it easier to work with because I work with Adobe Photoshop CS3 in other subjects.

Firstly I emphasised the influence of black within the photo,creating an ominous presence. I achieved this by 'masking' the areas behind the character John Walters, then filling the area I had selected with black. I also added the title of the film, placing it on the black in a white font so it stood out. I carried on using the same font, used throughout the film. Once I had added the title, I placed the logo that represents our production team and then other logos that existed within our film.

To make the logos appear more effective I had to erase all the white areas around the image. Furthermore I decided to retouch all the rigid areas around the 'Four Horsemen' logo, by zooming in on the photo showing all the uneven pixelated areas. I simply erased the uneven edges, using the 'eraser tool'. It was vital I organised my work accordingly, placing different steps into 'layers'. Layers are in Adobe Photoshop to hold part of an image or a whole image, create exacting adjustments to our images, combine multiple images, or create new images. They are effects or images that have been placed into the programme by the editor, which then can be organised into groups or named.

 After I had completed these steps I looked through the images we had taken for the poster, and decided to start a new draft on an image that looked effective. I saved this draft and began editing a new image immediately.

Wednesday 7th December

In today’s lesson we have finished the editing of our evaluation, and are now looking for specific pictures to add into our final evaluation, we have edited all of our evaluation including the sound, and we are now biding our time, looking for pictures to include into our evaluation. As the producer I am closely watching over the process of the evaluation, and watching closely at the editing.

Wednesday 23rd November

Today we have started and completed our evaluations, which included talking about production work, editing, and research and planning. All these areas were key as this was essential for us creating a professional and successful looking trailer, all of which were included in our evaluation. As our entire group members had different roles, so therefore we had to talk about our specific roles, and how we helped the group to create a successful trailer.

Monday 21st November

We have finally overcome our problems with the editing of our poster and magazine cover. We used a specific technique on Adobe Photoshop called masking, which allowed us to go around Jimmy’s head, and put the title behind his head, this was a great achievement for us, as we had never used masking in any editing process before. Our poster was also a success as we used a technique which also allowed us to mask around jimmy’s body and therefore, out a jet black background, showing a mysterious shadow lingering over jimmy, as stated in previous posts, this is because we wanted to create an unclear character.

Wednesday 9th November

Both the poster and magazine covers have hit a small stumbling block as the editing process on both have become very tricky to understand and complete, therefore, causing our editors a slight problem in completing them. We are having problems with Adobe Photoshop as our Title is going in front of our lead actors head, therefore making the poster look unrealistic and scruffy. We are also having a problem with the background, as we cannot colour around our character without colour going over him, we are working together in trying to solve these minor issues.

Wednesday 2nd November

Now all of our production work was complete we then had to move on to the editing of our poster and magazine cover. This proved difficult for us as we had hundreds of photos to choose from. Through the choosing process, we wanted to create something that would stand out, but also represent what our character was about, as our character comes across as a drunken mess who is unclear in what way his life is heading. So we thought having a dark background on one side, and a light shining on the other, would represent a clear and maybe mistaken character, and how his life is slowly transforming.

With our magazine cover we wanted to create something that was eye-catching, and would intrigue the reader, we included added incentives, such as other films we had thought of, and put them on our front cover, for this we used different fonts to show how they all have their own styles and different representations. Then we thought that this would be a continuity error for our magazine and make it stand out for the wrong reasons.
Our magazine and poster is coming along nicely, we now just have to add the finishing touches, and then we will be completely finished.

Post Production

This image was taken infront of a green screen, to make the editing process easier. I experimented with this picture, creating multiple examples of review ideas.

With this image I had the idea to manipulate the shadow and tone of the image. I converted the colour tone to sepia, portraying an 'old-fashioned' effect. Furthermore the sepia tone distorted the quality of the image, emphasising the old style effect I was trying to achieve.

The main issue with this image was the photo wasn't taken on a blank background. Therefore editing was difficult when selecting and manipulating the image. I had to black out the entire background and remaster the position of objects.

This was our final chosen image to use for our magazine front cover. We decided as a group this was the most effective and neat image for a magazine cover. I managed to manipulate this photo, by adjusting the brightness, contrast and tone of the image. Furthermore I added the title of the cover and placed it behind the character, similar to the 'Empire' magazine.

Production: Draft Idea

Here is a very roughly edited teaser poster that was edited from an old photo we found in our files on a memory stick. This is not our official movie teaser poster but just a rough draft we liked. It follows the conventions of a Johnny Cash album cover but not the same size. As you can see it is very minimalistic in terms of text only the title can be seen & there is no tagline.

It is supposed to look like John Walters the character is standing on stage in all his glory with his guitar on his back in an iconic Johnny Cash like pose. The spotlight is focused on the character and the text is very minimalistic showing classic conventions of a movie poster.

Editing with Final cut express

The problem we have as a group is that we have spent years editing on Adobe Premiere Pro program which is a simple yet effective footage editing program. We have now moved to final cut express with the mac which is very similar to premiere pro but it allows you to edit HD footage and create SFX and computer generated effects but it can only be used on a Apple MAC.

Since me and Dave have been editing on this program we have found many problems such as:

How to import text into the film.

How to add/take away sound from your footage.

As you can imagen for creating a film trailer especially a teaser, text and sound are absolutley fundemental for our progress in work. We are just starting to adapt to the program now and I personally have found that the youtube tutorials helped us with editing greatly infact I now know how to create good looking text that suits our film.

13/06/2011 Issue With Editing

Today the objective was to learn how and try to rip the vocals out of a song so that only the backing music would be left and I could sing in place of the original artists voice. It is presenting problems though and we need to find another way around it because our song "Beast in me" by Johnny Cash is an essential part of our trailer which will coney much meaning. I feel the music in teaser trailers has to be gripping & most importantly has to have subliminal meaning with the footage that is shown. I still have not managed to master the ripping of vocals but i'm going to keep on trying.

Friday 10th june

Today as a group we edited our opening footage from our teaser trailer, John Walters. We have used Jimmy's mac laptop to render our shots into HD. last night Jimmy and Liam shot a few little scenes, which would give us our opening to our teaser trailer. whilst Dave, Liam and I edited the opening. Jimmy was looking closely into Johnny cash's songs, as he was trying to convert the album into MP3. after school we will also be filming the downfall of Walters, where he has finally crashedto rock bottom.

Tuesday 7th June 2011

Tuesday we had to place our pitch that we presented, onto the blog. I edited the pitch and cut off a part at the end of the clip that we didn't need. Also I added titles and transitions to title the pitch. Furthermore I changed the background of the blog, placing an image of our character 'John Walters' as the background.