Photoshop Practice

I have decided to get some practice on Photoshop for when we have to design our own film poster.


The first poster i decided to do was for a horror film. With this poster i practiced how to layer images and crop out images for what i want.

With the second poster i decided to do it for a sci-fi. In this poster i tried to enhance my skills of cropping and layering. I also tried to add effects, i added a lens flair.

Research into credit sequences

Credits are the last thing someone watching a film would see so they are a great way to credit people within the film as well as leaving a good impression. Fun credits usually appear at the end of kids films and can reference the storyline.  (Seen here in Despicable Me 2) Where the minions are auditioning.





Movie credits can also be a spectacular show of CGI while still crediting the movie's production team.
(Seen here in Thor)




Overall I think our credits need to be fun and still retain the viewer's attention to leave our short film on a positive note to them, we plan to incorporate post it notes in our credits as they are something that is iconic and recognisable about our film.

Poster design considerations and inspirations

For successful marketing of our film we need an accurate and good looking film poster to attract our audience. After research online and analysis of other film posters its important our poster contains several of these key areas;

• Grab attention- A boring and bland poster wouldn't make any potential audience members interested and motivated to see our film. 

• Be iconic of our film- With our film revolving around post-it notes an actual post it note would be good to include on our poster. Scream is one of the most iconic films and is instantly recognisable by its famous mask. The establishing of the mask makes designing a poster for a sequel film easier.

• Appeal- To get attention from our target audience it must appeal to them, this would include using relevant language, imagery and possible ratings. For the hunger games specifically as it was a successful book similarities shown between the book and the film in the poster would attract the books reader as they can be sure it's stuck close to the books storyline.

Title sequence solution

 

This flipbook is an example of something which we could use to outline parts of the house in our title sequence. This could then help the audience establish aspects of our film. Potenitally, both ideas could be used within our title sequence to have different views of the film. This could then appeal more to the audience as it would look and appear more interesting due to the differents dynamics in the title sequence.

Timelapses

In our film there are periods of time which drastically change to different times of day. When I began editing the footage which we had previously shot I realised that the two shots we were going to use in sequence didn't match and looked wrong. We had this problem with shots before and had used fade to black and fading in through the next shot. As there were many examples of fading in and our already existent in the film we wanted to use different editing techniques to make our film look less boring as it would be filmed in a different way.

At the beginning of our film there is an establishing shot of the outside of the house which sets the scene for the whole film. As this was a recognisable concept already from within the film I thought that when filming the time lapse it would be a good idea to get the house in shot so that the audience could clearly distinguish that the next part of the film was still in the same setting as used previously. I went onto websites such as YouTube which allowed me to look at different examples of time lapses to give me ideas on how I could film my own. When it came to filming my own I set the camera and tripod up on a diagonal angle to ensure that the house and the sky was included within the shot. This was so the audience could link the house and the period of time which had changed. I then filmed the timplapse for 1 hour to make sure that there was enough to show a long period of time passing.

After the footage was captured I trasferred it onto Adobe Premiere Pro on a new topic before putting it into the film. Once I had done this I set the footage to a faster pace so that it wouldn't take as much film time. Also, if this shot was too long it would bore the audience and make them less interested in the film.

Start of timelaspe

End of timelapse

From the images inserted on the left there is a clear distinguishment between the time of day which allows the audience to know what is happening in the day. This also contributes to making the continuity in our film better.

Another thing it allowed me to do was learn new skills within editing on the programme Adobe Premiere Pro. This means that when editing in the future I could then use this knowledge to make improvements later on. By learning these techniques it allowed me to avry the editing techniques which were demonstrated in the film. I wanted to learn this as there were many cut to black and fade to black. As I wanted to demonstrate the skills and techniques I have learnt I thought by varying the shots it would make the film look more interesting to the audinece making it more of a success overall.

Video Questionnaire

Unusual shots in our film

When filming we began to encounter issues with lighting which made it harder to film and get the shots the way that we wanted them to be. When filming the scene where Matt get's the bag out of the wardrobe we were using a manual focus to ensure that there was no blur in the sequence of shots. As the wardrobe doors were shut when the shot was filmed the camera picked up the darkness well. However, when the wardrobe door opened the light from the window came in and the camera tried to adjust to the lighting change.

After when I began to edit this footage I matched up the times so I could see how the sequence would flow together. When I watched the footage back although it looked unusual it added a sense of realism to the film as it was something which may happen in real life. As the film needed to be realistic through what we were representing I thought that it was important to include this when editing the film together. This would then make our film look more unique as there are not many films which would include these sort of shots within film.

Light glare