Completed trailer focus group

Here is the focus group that we completed after we had finished our trailer, so we came up we questions for our questionnaires. Then we gather are target audience and asked them to watch our trailer and answer our questions. In the images below our some of the answers that our focus group gave us. 

Questionnaire for our trailer focus group

Official TRANSFIXED movie trailer

Editing session 14

Yesterday we gathered our actors to film one more piece of footage so the start of our trailer explicitly hinted that our protagonist Maddie come be responsible for the disappearance of Elliot. So today me and my group went back and uploaded the footage onto Final Cut Pro so that we have it ready for Wednesday for our focus group. 

So during today's editing session the shot needed the blade using on it as it was too long and we didn't need all of the raw footage to include within out trailer sequence. Then we had to decide where we would insert it onto the timeline above, as we didn't want it to be too early but we didn't want it to be late, so it was inserted between some transitions we had inserted in a previous editing session. 

Then during our editing session we had completed adding the new footage to the time line of our trailer on Final Cut Pro, so I then I went onto file of Final Cut Pro and went on share and then I shared it with DVD. This then asked me to save a name and then I change the area to where it was being saved to the desktop, and then I dragged it onto the upload on Youtube and dropped the video file onto the import section, and the photo above is it being processed onto Youtube.

Extra filming session

Today Amber and the actors who play Maddie and Elliot met me at my house which is the setting for the trailer, and we thought it would keep to continuity if we did it in the same setting than in another, as we didn't want it to be confusing. Due to us having to give the actors their roles and lines we didn't start filming until around twelve-thirty.

 
So this is the hint to the audience that Maddie could possible be involved, so when we were ready to start filming we moved into the kitchen as this was where me and Amber thought they should of the argument. First I set the trip pod up and then I started to position the actors whilst I was doing this Amber got the camera ready for the scene.

Next filming session - Update to trailer

During today's lesson today'd editing session I went and got one of my teachers and asked her to give us feedback on the trailer me and my group had create. She suggested we needed to drop more hints at the beginning of the trailer that Maddie could be a possible antagonist to throw the audience of. So me and my group have decided upon Sunday 17th January to film these shots with our actors, this will occur between twelve and one o'clock. Any footage we get will need to be editing before Wednesday before our focus group and our focus group in order for us to get feedback upon our trailer.

Teacher feedback on our trailer

Today we finished adding the final pieces to our soundtrack and then we decided to get some feedback from our teacher. This was to get another outside perspective who would be honest on anything that we needed to improve in order to make our work of a high standard.



So once we had our discussion with our teacher she suggested that the beginning was explicit enough to show the audience that the couple were not happy together, she said that wasn't any direct hints that Maddie could of done it at the start they were all towards the end. But overall our feedback was good our teacher just said that we should consider making it more clear that Maddie is angry at Elliot. So an example of this would be 'I hate you' or 'I wish you were dead' this automatically makes Maddie the prime suspect to the target audience.

Editing session 13

During today's editing session we focused on synchronising the sound to what was going on in the image. Today we also added another soundtrack as we didn't think the original soundtrack was fast paced enough. We also adjusted the volume of some of the shots that contained dialogue so that they could be heard over the non-diegetic soundtrack.

This image shows the timeline after I imported the non-diegetic
soundtrack on to it.In order to import the soundtrack I had to save
it to the desktop and then open it using ITunes. Then I went on Final
Cut Pro and clicked on the music icon and went down to recently added,
and then I dragged the soundtrack across onto the timeline. 

Here I am adjusting the volume, this is so that the
dialogue can be heard over the non-diegetic soundtrack.
This is because beforehand you couldn't hear the dialogue
over the soundtrack, so I enhanced it so it can be heard. 

Here is the media soundtrack that I imported
onto the IMac's, this is it being shown on my
memory stick. Then I saved it from my memory
stick onto the desktop. 

Editing session 12

During today's editing session we tried adding a more upbeat horror themed soundtrack, so that the sound was synchronised with what was going on within the footage

Here are the different soundtracks that I imported into Final Cut Pro.
In order to import it I had to save the downloaded song onto the
computers desktop. Then once had put the songs onto the desktop
I opened it with ITunes, and once I did this I had to go into the
music symbol and on on the recently added songs. 

Here is an image of the practise overlapping soundtrack that I imported onto Final Cut Pro, however this didn't fit into the sequence or not with the conventions of a horror so I removed it.

Here is a recording of music which is sound in my
sound research, we tried to put this onto Final Cut Pro,
however we had some difficulty trying to upload this
onto Final Cut Pro.

Audience Research Feedback on our trailer

Today we gathered one female and one male for our audience feedback. They are both in are target audience, so we wanted to get their feedback on what they thought of the trailer so far and any corrections they believed we should make.


So in the video above is just after they had watched the trailer from start to finish, and then me and my group starting to ask them questions about the trailer.

Here is our audience watching the trailer before any feedback was
given on their opinion of what they thought.

Again here is another image of our target audience watching the trailer
footage before they give us any feedback.

Audience feedback

During editing today me and my group couldn't all agree on the way we want the sound to be layered throughout the trailer so we have decided that we are going to gather a couple of are target audience, in order for audience feedback. As audience feedback is very important we we want our trailer to appeal to our target audience.

Editing session 11

During today's editing session me and Amber added some sound to the timeline of the trailer and then we moved in to synchronise with what was going on in the trailer. Then we all started to watch the whole trailer from the start to the end, to ensure we had done all colour matching correctly and editing was sharp and precise for continuity. During today's editing session I also detached audio from any clips we didn't need it as we didn't want it to interpret the soundtrack we wanted to use.
Here we have the footage of the of our non-diegetic soundtrack, in order to get this onto Final Cut Pro I had to save it to the desktop, and then I opened it with ITunes. Then I imported them from Final Cut Pro onto the time line and I moved it and used the blade to crop it so it was synchronised with the footage, as I wanted some synchronised sound.

Here we are looking at different different sound
effects and different soundtracks to incorporate
into our trailer.

Here is the trailer time line with some of the
non-diegetic soundtrack incorporated into it.  

Here are the four different sound effects and soundtracks that
we decided we liked the most, and we believe they would
fit well with our trailer piece. 

Here I am detaching the sound from some of my
shots that no longer needed sound. I did this
because the sound didn't fit well with the
non-diegetic soundtrack. 

Here are all the soundtracks and sound effects I have put onto the
time line, and all the overlapping sound. 

Here we suggested adding a doorbell sound effect to our sequence, however this use of diegetic sound didn't work in our favour and after I had used the blade to trim the sound down we all decided we didn't like it. We thought is tuck away the scary build up and wasn't effective enough so we decided not to keep it.


Here is our overlapping footage, I wanted to use the footage of the antagonist dragging the spade across the floor. I wanted it to go from the previously clip into the actual clip of him dragging the spade. So I dragged the sound to make it longer as you can see in the footage.

Ancillary task: Magazine completed

So that you can tell my poster and magazine are linked I have used the a protagonist for the dominant back image. I have also incorporated red to go with my questionnaire research, where my audience said they expect to see red and black on the magazine. 

Sound Research

During editing we have decided that we need some non-digetic and digetic sound for our trailer to bring it all together.


Here is a soundtrack with non-diegetic sound throughout but then you have diegetic sound of children which I think sounds very sinister and makes you feel very afraid. However I don't think it will fit with the narrative of out trailer as we don't have any children in it so it wouldn't work to use it, it would become confusing as our audience wouldn't understand the relevance of the children. I like the diegetic whispering it builds up suspense however again it would be appropriate for signs of the disruption in the Tovordo's theory but then I don't think it would blend well into another other soundtrack we decided to pick.

Ancillary task: poster completed

Instead of using the protagonist as the dominant main  image I decided to blend that into the image of the antagonist. I did this of Serif Draw using the feather technique to help it blend to the back image better.

Editing session 10

Today me and my group decided we wanted to include a sting so we were going through our shots trying to decide which one we would like to use. We wanted one that was extremely scary and would make the audience jump. We also starting looking at title sequences as I had previously suggesting in an editing session we should have the title sequence after our montage of images.

Here is one of the title sequences that we looked
at, this is the one that we decided not to go with .
 As we liked the other one the most, and then I
suggested we needed to add more shadows So I
experimented with the colours and the shadowing.
Also I have suggested changing the white to black
to connote death. But in the end we decided not
to use this one. 

This is the title sequence that we finally decided
to go with. We Changed the background colour, like
I suggested, this was to connote death and mystery.
However we still kept the red for the title as it
connotes danger and violence. Which are all
typical conventions of a horror. Also I would like
to consider including a dripping sound of some
sort for the shadows of the text as its could
connote blood.

Editing session 9

Today me and my group went back and we continued to editing, this involved the removal of sound we no longer needed and colour matching more shots to show continuity throughout where it is needed.



Here is another shot we had to play around with in order to keep continuity, as you can see in the footage I had the crop icon up as the extreme close up of Maddie was originally portrait so I enlarged it further to make the footage landscape to fit in with the rest of the trailer. I also colour matched  the close up to the extreme close up because they were in different lightings. So I had to colour match because they were in the same setting and to ensure we had continuity.


Here is a where we decided to remove our character Elliot walking from the car to the front door, as we thought it was quite boring and time consuming. We didn't think it would keep our audience gripped enough. So I used the black to remove the walk from the car to the house and then we incorporated a transition to encourage more continuity and it worked more effectively as it is no longer too long.


Previously we did some research into home invasions and we based on movie loosely upon this research, so we decided to incorporate this into our trailer sequence. I also believe that this will make the feel more afraid as this makes the events even more realistic, especially to real life.

Editing session 8

During today me and my group went back to the IMacs to continue editing on Final Cut Pro, we did this during lunch time for around half an hour and we spent one hour of editing after school. So we watched our sequence over again and then came up with some new ways to improve our trailer sequence. During this editing shot we altered our order of shots and we are happy with the order that they're in. Today we also added text which was our quote to our sequence, and then we started to input our transitions into our trailer sequence. Then we started the colour matching process of some of our shots. This was to ensure we represented continuity as some of the shots were filmed in either different lighting and different days so they didn't look exactly the same so we started to alter this. 

Here is a representation of what our current timeline looks like on Final Cut Pro. This image represents and shows the length of our shots and the high and low pitch sound that is used within each shot type.

Here is a close up shot of the montage and as you can see from the image the shots are very short and concise, I got my inspiration for this from 'You're Next' trailer and in the 'You're Next' trailer they used quick and snappy shots and this worked effectively so this is what we tried to do.  When watching the trailer it built up anticipation and this is the effect I wanted to create. Also in this image you can see the transition that we are currently thinking abut using and this is called a 'simple blur'. 

Here is an image of the text we are going to use and this text is known as 'Reflection' and then I altered with the size of the text and whether or not to have a glow. I tired putting a glow however we and my group didn't think it was effective for the atmosphere we were trying to create. So in the end I created a slight shadow of the text so that is was simple but not to simple as we don't want to much going on for the text, we want it to be straight to the point. 

Here I am going through all the different fonts that can be used on Final Cut Pro. Then we and my group suggested a few that we liked and then we eventually agreed on 'Iowan Old Style' for the front and 'Reflection' was the style of font you wanted to base it on and this was the one that altered it slightly as we didn't like 'Reflection' on its own.

Here we have the montage before we have added any text to it; we decided that is needed something else to make it more interesting and make the audience concentrate more on it. But we didn't know what would grab the audience so we decided to come back to this so that we were not wasting time thinking when we had other bits of work to do of the editing process. 

This is the montage with text incorporated into it a little bit before and then afterwards. So I suggest adding a little before the montage, however we didn't like the way this looked so we had an ‘Apologies don’t mean anything’ before the montage. Then later we had ‘If you keep doing’ also before the montage. Then the rest of the quote was individually separated before the shots within the montage. The individual words were ‘What you’re sorry for’. This looked much more effective and we felt that we concentrated more on the montage and it made us want to watch it to find out what we the audience were being told. 

Here is an extreme close up shot of an eye, which I had to use the transform tool on Final Cut Pro to do, this was because the shot was landscape and it would disrupt continuity so we had to make it completely fit the screen so I pressed transform and pulled the corner of the shot to stretch the shot to fit the screen. Me and my group looked through the transitions, and then I added a transition in because without it, it didn't look right so I added a transitions to encourage more continuity throughout.

Then we have images that we have colour matched, this was so we have more continuity throughout our trailer. I colour matched the fight scene to the footage of the antagonist jumping up at the window in the door. And then I also colour matched the footage of the character Elliot about to be stabbed using a phallic symbol, and I colour matched this to the fight scene between Delaney and Maddie as me and my group thought that the colour was effective as many shadows were created and it kept with continuity. 

Here we have a shot of Maddie doing her make up in the mirror and the antagonist Delaney appearing in the mirror. However originally you watch Delaney walked to that position, however I didn't think it looked effective or even scary. So then I suggest we tried jump cutting it so she appears unexpectedly and this will make it more intense. So I used the blade to remove the part where Delaney moves into the shot, so one minute it’s just the protagonist Maddie in the shot and then the antagonist appears out of no-where which adds more anticipation as we don’t know what’s going to happen. It looked more effective once I had created this jump cut and my group also liked it so I decided to keep it. 

Then we have our ending to our trailer sequence, so I said putting the shot of the antagonists walking up the path after the montage could be effective because it suggests to the audience they’re coming. And then I added a transition as our title will be coming after these two shots. But later on we decided we may not use these shots and we may use a ‘Sting’ instead, to make the audience more afraid. 

According to the dictionary a ‘Sting’ is used to introduce a regular section of a show, indicate the end of a scene, or indicate that a dramatic climax is coming.

Magazine Draft Two

I am having some difficulty with using photoshop, I am finding it confusing to use and I have spent many hours trying to figure it out. However my work doesn't look of a professional standard so I have decided to move onto Serif Draw Plus to complete my magazine.

Here is a new image I have decided to consider for my magazine cover as the antagonists are in this shot, this look very sinister looking. Black is mainly used to connote death, this is one of the covers my target audience said they would want to see on a magazine over. I found this out through my questionnaire.

Here I am removing the background of an image, as I didn't require some of the image, so I used the cut out studio to do this. On this image you can see that the background has been removed so I was just trying to smoothen out the lines on the image as best as possible, so it looks of a professional standard.

Here is another image I put in the cut out studio and this image demonstrates the background being removed from as I only wanted the mask I didn't want the background.

Here is the image after it had been in the cut out studio, and then I used the editing technique called feathering to make the edges of the photo look smooth. So this is the image I have decided to use as the dominant image on my magazine. 

This is an image before I got rid of any of the background on the cut out studio.

This is where I used the feather tool and you can also alter the opacity, the blue and the cut off so you an have it to what ever way blends best with your work.

Film Poster Draft Two

Here I did some more experimenting as I am still learning to use the software, and it can be quite confusing, so I have been using a lot of YouTube tutorials on-line in order to make it look more of a professional nature, because in my draft one it didn't look very professional. So I have continued trying to get the image to the colour I want it to be before I do any more to the image. 

So I filled in the rest of the image and used the photo lab on Serif Draw Plus to to fade my image into the black and I also decreased its brightness to -25% and my contrast was at 0%. I wanted innocent and death to be connoted within my poster. So I kept a shadow of lighting on her face, this is to represent the purity and innocent, but as there is so little light it suggesting the dark is out weighting the light. The bad is consuming the good.

I have previously had the idea of making my poster look similar to a montage however This have been incredible difficult to do, so I started of small and then I will attempt to try further images on the poster, however I don't want to overcrowd it. So I imported the image of the antagonist and the protagonist and then I went into the Cut out studio to remove the background, this was difficult because the background wasn't plain so the blade kept catching aspects of my image, so I had to decrease the size of the blade and slow go around the image and click the areas I wanted to remove. Once this was completed this I then tuck the image to the photo lab and I experimented with the different effects that I had but I didn't like any on them so I decided to fade the image into the shadows so it gives more of a montage look. So in order to do this I kept my brightness at 0% and the contrast at 70% and then I decided I wanted to add an effect after this so I added an effect called black and white film. Where I used different percentages of the colour such as red was -35% and yellow was -82% for me to create the faded black colour I have.

Film Poster Draft One

Here our my first drafts for my film poster for my ancillary tasks, however as I was just experiment they do not look of a professional standard, so I am going to continue to learn to use the software Photoshop and Serif Draw plus in order to continue editing them and get them to a professional standard. 

Here is the starting product, first I imported my image of the protagonist Maddie, this is just me experimenting with the different ways I can create shadows. As from my poster questionnaire I have learnt that my target audience want shadows and dark colours so I have tried to keep to this. So I faded the image in order to make it look darker and create more shadows, plus I wanted the black to connote death and mystery. But as I faded the background made it even more unprofessional so I decided to use the Cut out Studio on Serif Draw Plus. Then because I had background missing I had to add another colour over so it wasn't blank, so I used the freedom paint brush tool to add the black around the image. 

Then I tried to neaten up the edges from where I had used the freedom paint brush tool, so I used the icon to create shapes so that the edges were straight and very neat. This was very time consuming because I had to neaten up the boxes and then fill them with black. However it could accurately be neatened up because of the way the shadows had been created. 

Photoshoot

Today me and my group decided to meet up with our characters to take any remaining photos we may need for our ancillary tasks. We have previously taken photos during filming, however we wanted to dedicate a few hours to taking photos specifically for our ancillary tasks, as we didn't have time to get very good quality photos. So the photos I have practiced on photoshop may not be the ones I may use. However some of the photos I have practised using are photos I consider to look of a professional standard so I have used them but since getting newer photos today I may consider using them.

I like this photo because it looks sinister and scary and with shadowing added on Photoshop I could make this image look more scary to the audience. This image I would consider using on both my poster and magazine, but I would make it darker to have a more sinister effect to it, and then maybe add blood, and I would also be removing the background and adding it to a plain background. 

This is a photo I tuck using the front camera of my photo, I held up the knife and tried to capture the antagonist looking scary. This image would be a good one to use for my poster, however I would want to remove the background and just keep the knife. But with the background being so crowded I don't know if Photoshop would remove it all. However I am going to experiment with this one as I like it. 

I also like this image because it have a good use of shadowing within the background, and shadowing is one of the key conventions of  a horror film. so I would try to remove the background but try to key the shadow on Photoshop. Also the antagonist looks afraid and this is the message I want to get across, so people wonder why she is afraid and want to find out. 

Here is another image I may possible consider as the protagonist looks incredible scared. I would again remove the background and maybe create a montage behind the character, however I am going to experiment possible with this as it may make it look too overcrowded and it won't look to a professional standard if its overcrowded. 

This is another image I like and because it has a black background it will be easier to crop the antagonist out as there is not background to interfere with it.  However the shadow across the face puts me of a little because I don't think it looks very good, so it I can remove this shadow without ruining the image then I may consider using it for my magazine or my poster.