WELCOME MODERATOR

Alastair Simpson

1452

CLAREMONT FAN COURT SCHOOL 64680

 Welcome to my blog.

I worked with Oliver Roberts 1449 and Callum Drewett 1413

I hope you enjoy my blog for H540 Media Studies G324 Advanced Portfolio in Media.

I took specific responsibility for filming the airplane scene as well as the running and sports scenes, directing the hospital scene and editing the trailer.

Brief 2:
A promotional package for a new film, to include a trailer, together with a film magazine front cover, featuring the film and a poster for the film.

Our TRAILER is immediately below. My individual FILM MAGAZINE COVER and individual POSTER are above.

All my RESEARCH and PLANNING follow below that on the main blog roll, in reverse order, starting with the latest first. To present my research and planning, I have used a wide variety of platforms and tools, including emaze and piktochart.

My EVALUATION is above under four Pages. Clicking on each tab will show the research and planning that went into my responses to these questions. 
To present my responses, I have used the following platforms: 
question 1 on genre conventions: Analysis of my promotional products with annotations.
question 2 on combination of main production with ancillaries: Visuals of the products and an explanation of how they are synergised with each other
question 3 on feedback:  Emaze 
question 4 on technologies: Visuals of which technologies I used throughout my coursework

Below you can see the final promotional product which is our movie trailer

CONSTRUCTION: HOSPITAL CUTAWAY SHOT

Whilst constructing our shot for the Hospital scene I was the director for the scene and Callum Drewett was the cameraman. Our shot consisted of a full shot showing the room that the actress was in to show the environment around her.

For the camera shot, we started with a head level shot and then went to a slightly lower angle shot as we panned and tracked the movement of our actress. We used this pan and movement to differentiate this shot to others and make this shot seem more fluid as we edit it together with other shots.

We set up some objects in the background of the image to make the scene look more like a hospital, you can see a hospital bed as well as a container where dangerous chemicals or needles would be put if they need to be disposed of. This makes the scene more believable in order to create a more realistic scene.

CONSTRUCTION: TV NEWS REPORT SHOT

In the starting sequence of our trailer we will show a reel of different news reports talking about North Korea as well as Artificial Intelligence (AI). We will also create our own news report where we see and interviewer, interviewing Max Tegmark the writer and author of Life 3.0 where he talks about the dangers of AI in the future and how it will change the way that the world works. In this short clip of the interview, the audience will find out how dangerous AI is and that North Korea have made multiple cyber attacks using this technology against their enemies.

In the end we didnt use this idea, we found that artificial intelligence was irrelevant towards the plot of our trailer. Instead we made our own news reports by using a green screen and putting news report footage and images behind the people who we had speak in the news reports. In these images below you can see the way that we set up the greenscreen in order to create our very own news reports.

CONSTRUCTION: PLANE CONVERSATION

Involved in the construction of this scene was the process of building the green screen. We also used an Ipad with the application Green Screen by Do Ink to insert a background of the outside of a plane. We used live action filming in this scene and the actor in this scene acted as the father towards the teenagers who are the main characters in our trailer.

This was the way we set up the green screen, we had the actor in frame on the Ipad with the application that rendered the image onto the green screen.

For the second layer we used an image of plane windows with the windows being a green screen so that we could put our own video of the outside of an aeroplane onto the green screens of the window.

The live footage of a birds eye view of London was taken from a British Airways flight this year that shows iconic London buildings like Tower Bridge as well as the hugely recognisable River Thames

This is how we set up the green screen alongside the Ipad with a tripod so that the frame was straight whlst we filmed the scene.



Then we used our actor for this scene, made his upper body in the frame, filmed him doing his lines and that was the end of the scene. This is how it turned out, with the moving image you can see the different environment moving in the windows of the plane. This meant that there were three different layers when filming this scene, the first layer being the live action actor. The second layer being the frames of the aeroplane windows, and then the third layer being our own filming from the outside of an aeroplane.

PLANNING: CREATING OUR FILM POSTER

This is a collection of different movie posters where I can use some ideas from them and incorporate them into my final movie poster. These are other ideas of ways that I can compose my movie poster and also different techniques and tools I can use when creating my final movie poster.

In the Moonlight poster (top left) I plan to experiment with using different colours on the final edit of my movie poster. In the 71 posters I am going to use the technique of putting an image within another image, or inside the title of the movie. In the Total Recall Poster I might expoeriment with different editing styles on the main image of the poster. In this poster you can see an effect going out of the back of the main character as if he is breaking apart. Finally, the last convention I might use within my movie poster is editing images of the characters in different sizes just like they have done with the Getaway poster but with a car as the main images as well.

RESEARCH: FILM ESCAPE - CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

We decided to interview our characters, to get to know them. We got our inspiration from what we learnt from a blog called Film Escape. This screenshot is from the website called Film Escape, and is on this post Charlie Sierra writes about a man called Pen Densham who is an Oscar nominated film maker who has made 16 Feature Films. Pen Densham uses the technique of questioning his characters in order to get to know them better. This way he can learn how the characters work which allows Pen Densham to understand each character when filming a feature film. Questioning the characters means that Pen Densham can understand their personalities as well as the way they work. 

Our interview included the main characters being questioned about how they feel about the situation they have been put into and what happened along the way. This questionnaire and interview was to find out and further develop our character's personalities so that they are easy to understand when we release our film trailer.

Here you can see the interview where military personnel interviews two of the boys after the attack has occurred...

CONSTRUCTION: SCRIPT YOUR INTERTITLES

I went over the the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) website, and visited their subsection where I can view Trailers from recent and old movies. Here is where I am using this collection of trailers to analyse their use of Intertitles.

Lord of the Rings

The Trailer for The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies uses intertitles to grab the audience's attention by breaking down a sentence with little snippets that each have its own intertitle: 'This Year, from the Director of 'The Lord of the Rings trilogy'/ prepare for the defining moment of the Middle-Earth Legend'. 

However, this is broken up into 5 different parts which are spread throughout the trailer. This means that as the person is viewing the trailer they want to carry on the sentence, and to do so they need to go through the whole trailer. It functions almost like a voice over that is guiding us through. This constant need to know what is being said in the intertitles also means that the viewer watches the whole trailer. 

The imperative 'Prepare for' is quite a bold and demanding statement telling all people viewing the trailer to be ready. Epithets like defining and legend suggest the prestige of the project, all of which is enhanced by the glowing gold lettering.

Delivery Man

In this movie trailer the start is where all of the intertitles are seen. They are presented in an almost slide show format with lots of images of people surrounding the intertitles. It is also presented with a voice over that reads sentences with that say very similar things that are seen on screen. 

This voice over and style we are presented with at the start of the trailer gives context to the unknown for the scenes of the movie that we see after this intertitles section. After we know that these pictures of people have something in common, we see the next part of trailer which shows what they do have in common. Intertitles here are used give context for the movie and the voice over also guides us through this part. 

These intertitles also intrigue the audience because the words unique and common are complete opposite words. This enigma leads to the viewer being tantalised by the hunger of curiosity which leads them to find out what lies behind this enigma. Here the intertitles use of apparently contradictory words unique and common features as a bait that whets our curiosity.