Four Horseman Evaluation Part 1.

Four Horseman Evaluation Part 2.

The Resurrection Of John Walters Teaser Trailer

Another Edited rough copy of a movie poster.

We think this looks like more of an album cover rather than a teaser poster. Still i think it is a cool concept with the tag line which is a convention for the movie poster. And "COMING SOON" is also a convention that we stuck too and used. The logos at the bottom are always used for movie posters aswell. Again this is like the Clint Eastwood poster we posted previous. It also has a great sixties feel to it with the Ray Ban sun glasses. Again this is a rough draft and is not our offical movie teaser poster.

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.

Photo shoot. Wednesday the 5th of October.

This is an example of one of the photos taken on Wednesday. The intention of these photos was to use them for our magazine front cover. We thought by using this back ground we could straight away elminate creating a back ground on photoshop. Simply because the back ground here is perfect its dingy and minimalistic. I also feel it looks alot like an Empire Magazine front cover because the photos are usually taken way before the production has even started. Almost like the photo is taken especially for the magazine front cover in some sort of contract.

As you can see we have decided to have the character in costume rather than the main actor in a suit. We decided to do this because we wanted to stick to the conventions of many other movie magazine covers. We also decided that it would be significant having a large shadow cast on the wall behind the character as it shows a potentional split-personality problem. Clearly this is no edited yet but we are currently working on our official magazine front cover right now.

Similar poster - Gran Torino

As you can see we based our simple draft poster which you can see further down on the blog on Clint Eastwood's brilliant 2009 film poster for "GRAN TORINO". The conventions for a poster like this are:

• "COMING SOON" at the bottom of the page shows it is still a while until it is released but builds excitment.
• "CLINT EASTWOOD" at the top before the title showing off that the film has a big named Hollywood actor in it which of course gets the lookers attention.
• The titles in a large golden font which is significant consdering everything else is dark and dingy in terms of colour.
• The list of actors, producers, all important crew members and the directors name can be seen under the title but it is always very small writing and faint because they do not want the small print to attract the lookers away from the star and the title. Also at the bottom the Warner Brothers logo is showing which is standard for a film poster shows the film companies involvement.
• Finally the actual picture is a side profile shot almost like a silhouette of a warn old face looking in the distance which create a sense of enigma "what is this about?".

I like this poster because it creates wonder and mystery the lighting is also very cool. We will create a similar look withour film poster.

Ancillary: Images For Poster and Front Cover

This is the first time we have worked with a green screen in terms of taking pictures I am still yet to make any sort of film footage using one though I hope to do that in the future. As you can see from this pictures we got some large bright lights from the photography department in our school. I feel those lights improved the pictures also it helped that we were using a DSLR HD camera. When using this specialist camera we found looking back at the images that we were impressed with how clear and crisp the photos were.

The editing process becomes a lot easier when using a plain or green background because it is very simple now to cut objects and people out of the photo. Using the green screen is also fun because there are a lot of backgrounds, fonts, objects and colours you can use with the editing programme.

Teaser Poster

This is not a final copy of our film teaser poster but it is a work in progress and i just wanted to show the sort of look we are going for. As you can see it is very minimalistic in terms of colour which reflects the tone and mood of the film. I like this close up side profile shot because it's almost like there is something different on the other side of his face which then leads onto viral marking and enigmas.



There is no font of writing on it yet. Obviously if this was our poster people would be asking what it is about because all it seems to be is a shot of a man with glasses on. Once a suitable tagline is fitted onto the poster such as "THE HARDER THE LIFE, THE SWEETER THE SONG" it will become a lot clearer in terms of what genre this film fits into. There is a certain class to this photo though black and white i feel pays respects to the old school film making methods. We are currently in the process on editing a final poster but we are thinking of making several ones as we want to explore what we can do with photoshop and green screened picture taking.

DVD Front Cover

Here is the front cover of our DVD case which shows a bottle of whiskey and John Walters looking up into the sky thinking about his problems. The light also is suggesting a resurrection hence the use the title of the movie. The conventions followed include the tagline at the bottom and the names of the people that are in the film at the top, again it is minimalistic and very gloomey a look we purposly created.

John Walters DVD

This is the back of a DVD cover. As you can see it has some clear conventions such as magazine and newspaper ratings also views from critics. I like the simple plain colour of it too. The costume and props used are minimalistic but it is clear this film is about a musician.

Film Magazine Front Cover

This is a cover from a 2010 edition. Though is is similar to the Indiana Jones magazine cover it is different in a sense that rather than the characters being on the front cover it is instead the actors. Every now and again these covers are produced because the actors involved in an upcomming movie are being interviewed. Personally i like it when empire do this becasue you get to see the person behind the famous character/persona and it is a route i would not mind going down myself, the only problem we are faced with is that obviously our film is not well known so the picture on the front of the magazine cover must be our character. The conventions of this type of magazine cover are :

• Often the actors are dressed smart or casual. This indicates that really behind their famous life style they are still normal people which everyday people can relate with.
• It strips down the actor purposely to their original state (they are not in costume) so a reader is priviledge to go into their everyday life and not just see a whacky or famous character.
• Similar to many back ground colours there is a grey with a hint of black. A lot like fog. This interview and the picture would have been taken in either pre-production or during filming so the back ground remains plain.
• The actors are staring directly at the camera and if you look at their feet it seems like they are walking towards the camera suggesting because this is a sequal the journey continues.
• Most of the time when the character has a photoshoot and is put on the magazine cover they look away almost looking in the distance and appear smouldering. With an actor it is differant they look at the camera and then when the picture is put onto the cover it is asthough they are looking at the viewer which suggests that the actor is letting you into their off sreen life.

How is this example useful?

This magazine cover helps because once again it shows how important the title of a magazine is to the owner & has made me think that we as a group need to come up with a good magazine title of our own. I like the idea of just showing the main actor on the cover because it seems asthough you are let into the inner workings of an actor but as i said in this case we are unfortunatly not famous already so our character will have to be the strong center image for this magazine front cover.

Research of Magazine Front Cover Empire

This is a Empire magazine cover taken from the 2009 edition. It is my job to pick out the typical conventions of these film magazines which we can then use in order to make a realistic movie magazine front cover ourselves.

• Empire can be seen clearly at the top of the page in large red letters, it is their logo and the characters overlap the writing this does not matter because Empire magazine is the worlds leading magazine and people know the logo well.
• The two actors are dressed as their character as it is Indiana Jones just from the whip and the hat he is instantly recognisable to the readers eye.
• They are not looking at the camera but at eachother which shows that there is going to be some sort of relationship formed here.
• The back ground is very minimalistic in a sense that it was proberly shot on a green screen and then through photoshop a gun metal grey/black background would have been added in.
• It is a convention that the background is blank because then your focus is on the characters or the actors on the front cover, also the fact the this would have been taken in pre-production means there is no official background yet because filming might not have started.

How is this a useful example?

Well i think by looking at many magazine cover the majority of them are include the character in their costumes because unless the actor is very well known legendary, the viewer is not going to know who it is in the first palce. With our film obviously not being well known we need to use the character in order to sell the magazine and the film otherwise it is just going to be a random person in normal clotheing doing a photo shoot.

Also a character is alot more appealing to the normal eye rather than just a guy in a suit, especially is the costume is cool such as Indiana Jones or Batman. So my conclusion is this is the road we will go down, there will be a simple back ground with just the character and perhaps a prop like a guitar.

Walk the Line Trailer

The teaser trailer from Walk the Line conveys many of the typical conventions we are looking to use in our own teaser for example:

Motion picture association always appears before the trailers footage starts to play.
Production logo and company name appears shortly after the motion picture association dissapears.
For this trailer graphics are used to explain some of plot line such as "Rock & Roll hall of fame" appears telling the veiwer that this will be a film about some sort of musician.
After graphics a short monolouge is said by a random character which puts the trailer into perspective that this is a struggling muscian trying to break the industry by attempting to get a record deal.

Quick editing is used such as short cuts of footage the main character performing (happy) and as the shots progress his nature seems to quickly deteriorate. Much sweating comes with this suggesting possible durg use within the film. It would seem the main character gains fame and with this has the attitude of a bachelor sleeping with many different women behind his wifes back.

Fame seems to go to his head immediatly and he soon has a come down which brings his nick-name "The Man In Black" which is a pictation of who he becomes inside a dark man, fuelled by sorrow and driven by rage.

Poster Ideas

One of the task we have been given with this A level unit is creating a poster to go with our teaser trailer.

I have decided that it is worth looking at Johnny Cash's CD covers and other pictures taken of him towards the end of his career. This is because he had an aged faced that was full of regret and sorrow. The life he lived was harsh, solitary and unforgiving all words that are summed up when you look at some of Cash's artisticly simple album covers. This album cover on the left is shows Johnny Cash's typical look "The man in black" as you can also see he is in a desert like enviroment which would obviously be extremely warm yet he is wearing a full length black coat and possibly a suit underneath. This suggests his outlaw like persona, not being like everybody else is what makes a legend. His guitar is like his only true love, the one thing that will always be there for him when lifes nasty road approaches will be his music.

These type of iconic images are the sort that we want to create for our film, pictures that crawl into viewers minds and bury a seed that grows into excitement to see a film.

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.

Influential films: Walk the Line Conventions

Conventions of Walk the Line the story of Johnny Cash's hardships in life.
Key conventions we must take from this film:

1. 1. Show the character healthy and free of addiction.
2. 2. Show the oppisite with the character suffering from addiction.
3. 3. Convey the fact that he onced had an incredible career but let it all out of his grasp for drugs and alcohol.
4. 4. Use realistic locations that look like Western America (possibly hard to pull of but can be done).
5. 5. Show love life interest slowly being ripped apart by addiction.
6. 6. Convey sympathy that will provoke the viewer to feel for this mans struggle in life.
7. 7. Put across that there is always hope in life no matter how bad the road ahead may seem.
8. 8. Great music comes from a depressed mind, music must be a key elemant, music is his saviour and realise from the harshness of the world.

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.

Production: Filming on the 10th of June

Friday the 10th filming session: It was a one shot take, me and Liam had to make sure that we knew exactly what we was doing in terms of capturing the great footage we wanted. For example Liam the director came up with the idea of creating a routine which he would be able to follow with the camera easily and not miss anything essential. So we ran it through a few times and the end product was to:

• firstly throw a cigarette on the floor and stamp it out
• grab the TV and smash it on the floor
• rip a white board off the wall
• smash a guitar against the wall
• then the character falls to his knees and cries with a bottle of whiskey

Overall this scene went very well to film i just had to listen to my director at all times and pay close attention to his instructions.

Feedback: Pitch

Feedback from presentation
· You will need loads of locations to cover John Walters journey as he goes through his addiction
· Need extras to make it seem like he is performing to an audience
· Will you use the school stage when performing to show that John Walters is at a venue?
· Sound may be an issue when filming outside so you may need to over dub layering recorded sound over the film.
· Filming in HD may require actors to wear make up
· What sort of music are you going to use? Existing music or are you going to sing your own songs.
· Could use a heartbeat sound effect showing his decent as images of his life flash up indicating his fall from grace.
· May need to use graphic titles for the film name but not for critical reviews or award nominations.
· Have a look on traileraddict.com to get an idea of how trailers are done.