Targetting Our Audience

As we already had our influential films in place from our last project we started to research into how these film target an audience. The chosen films were: Walk The Line (2005), Crazy Heart (2009) and  I'm Not There (2007).

Crazy Heart and I'm Not There are two films with a rated 15 certificate, because they contain scenes with more explicit objects or actions such as drugs, alcohol and nudity. Walk The Line is more discreet about showing these sensitive subjects, by showing them less frequent. In our film, the idea was to create an emotional and serious view on the affects of drugs and alcohol. To create a more indepth view of these substances we were liable to use graphic scenes that may contain violence and drug taking. This came into terms when we chose our target audience because we certainly did not want to explore this subject to younger spectators.

 Furthermore we felt as though this film would be targetted for a more mature audience, as children may not understand the message put across from the films and what the film shows. Similarly to the film Crazy Heart, our intentions were to show a dysfunctional life of the protagonist character (John Walters). We thought that someone may relate to this lifestyle by struggling with obstacles in the way of happiness. 

Research Into Front Covers

Empire is the world's leading film magazine and proved easy to find some influential front covers. I liked how the magazine always places the text behind an object/character, so I used the same style in our own magazine front cover. At first I had trouble doing this, as I wasn't too sure how to fulfill this effect. I simply looked on Bing.com and found a tutorial. I used Adobe Photoshop CS3 to complete this action, as it's a programme I use in other subjects and for personal use. 

I used this front cover to look at the wording of advertisement. For example when Empire states "First Look", I also wanted to add this exclusive peak to advertise. On our final draft of the front cover, I used 'World Exclusive' and 'First look at the wanderer', to give the same the effect but creating a subheading of world exclusive. I made subheadings like this to keep the arrangement of the poster neat, keeping to that old fashioned western theme. 

I also noticed that Empire have their own organisation of headings, always using 'Plus!' as a subheading for inside contents. I thought this was an effective way of targeting an audience, as it allows people to read the front cover and get an insight to what it contains. On our poster I made the sub heading 'More' to keep to our formal appearance I didn't use an exclamation mark.

Another well known film magazine is Total Film, who review trailers, films and film news. They're titling is often large, and make their  heading cover a quarter of the page.   Whilst creating the front cover, I noticed 'Total Film' use the same fonts in their layout or the same colour scheme. After learning this I thought the front cover would be neater if I kept the font the same on the cover, but I did vary this when adding film names. I felt adding the film names in a different font adds their own advertising to the front cover. 

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.

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.

Influential Films

Crazy heart is an american musical-drama film which is based on the life of a down and out conrty western singer (otis Blake) who tries to turn his life around when he meets a beautiful young journalist (Jean Craddock).
Blake is the main persona in the film as he is the main character on the poster.his distort apperance shows how his life may have panned out not quite planned, with his rugged look on the poster, as he looks scruffy and disorderly. Yet, once Blake meets this beautiful brunette, he decides to change his washed up appearance, and he is pushed to team up with a succesful and professional relationship with Tommy Sweet, a top country star. This may also be shown on the poster as he has a slight grin on his face, proving how he has turned a corner. With his once disgraced self, this could be emphasised by the tagline "The harder the life, The sweeter the song". Which may also show how Otis 'bad' Blake has changed is genral appearance and attitude in life.

Influential Films 12/09/11

In today's lesson we were analysising and studying two different types of trailers, such as teaser trailer's and theatrical traielrs. Once the class had finished studying these traielr's our group went off and identified 5 different trailers, these were:
Walk The Line
Crazy Heart
I'm Not There
Batman- The Dark Knight
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
We studied these carefully and identified specific analytical conventions which were key for our own teaser trailer, which we are hopeful of editing very soon.

I'm Not There Poster Analysis

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.

Locations: 22nd June 2011

In today's lesson, we had a problem with location searching. one of our locations for our trailer was the mnain school hall, we wanted to specifically check out the lighting situation, as we wanted our lead actor Jimmy Gore to be on stage with us recordin him, we could not conjour up the reason why the lighting for the stage lights were not working. we then scraped our issues with filming, to go back to the clssroom and work on some titles, and look at various influential trailers.

Whilst Dave, Liam and myself worked on the titles, jimmy was looking at trailers, which we could take inspiration from, and upload onto our blog. we finally agreed on the titles, of our four horsemen product, as well as our other production company, harlequin. we also looked at the trailer for walk the line, as this was an influential film for our own idea.

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.

Research Into Backing Track

Ain't No Grave (can hold my body down) by Johnny cash


This is one of many songs that we have thought about using for our trailer for John Walters. I particularly like this song because I believe it represents our main character John Walters very well because he is a man that abuses his own life by indulging in alcohol and drug abuse for long periods of time and yet he has not killed himself. So thats why i think the song would be suitable for the trailer because essential John Walters is mocking the fact that even though he is living a sinful lifestyle he is going unpunished while other innocent people are suffering.

Due to copy right purposes we wouldn't use the original version of this song but instead create our own rendition with the main actor Jimmy Gore singing the lyrics giving the whole song a much deeper meaning which hopefully provokes an emotional response from the viewers.

Liam Fitzpatrick

Planning: Character Types

I feel this is the look we need to capture in our trailer a man on the brink, a man that does just not care anymore. Music was once his life but now addiction has taken over. What better musical icon to base our main character on than the 'Man in Black' himself Johnny Cash.

Post Production: Friday 20th May 2011

Firstly we looked at what a blog is and used for, giving examples of blogs. Today we composed a variety of ideas and conventions for a short film. We mainly focused on the subject of a military styled film.  We’re also preparing to create pitch for next week to show the class our primary film idea.