UPDATE #10

We are about to break up for the Christmas holidays over which we plan to undertake most of our editing. Hopefully we will only need to fine-tune our editing together in the 2 weeks we have to finish off in the new year. All we have left to plan is our ident and edit, we will do both over the holidays so that we have more time for construction of graphics and ident next term.

UPDATED POSTER

I have updated the mock poster using the feedback that I gathered though Facebook, addressing as many of the problems as possible.

I also asked 2 graphic designers their opinions on how the poster could be improved purely for aesthetics as I felt there was something not quite right about it.

Most of the changes I made were quite subtle:

I am now much happier with the aesthetic of the poster since it is much more in the style of Saul Bass posters/title sequences or Pixar title sequences like Monsters Inc and The Incredibles. If we were to use this as our main poster I would want to update it once again to help improve how easy it is to understand. To do this it must reference the film more than it does, this can be done using stills from the film or a tagline.

TB

MOCK POSTER FEEDBACK

I sent a picture of my mock poster to a range of people via Facebook to gather feedback. I asked them to roughly answer these questions:

These were some of the answers I received:

1. Most people noticed the red background first - this was good as the red background was intended to catch people's attention and make it stand out.

2 + 3. Mixed opinions some said they like the font and the harshness of the figures, others said that this was exactly what they disliked about the poster.

4. Everyone liked the style overall except for one person who said that though they did like the simplicity they did think it was maybe too harsh.

An issue that a few people mentioned was that the poster didn't really give any clues as to what it was about, in other words they didn't really understand it. I feel this is the main point that needs to change as it is extremely important that the poster draws people to see the film and to do this people must understand what it's about.

TB

PAPERWEIGHT

HH

SPECIFIC STILLS ANALYSIS

The shots in the film are largely composed to represent and symbolise making the film less naturalistic and more expressionist to show themes and motifs clearly. For instance the key components of this shot rush out of shot to emphasise what is happening in the narrative. 

HH

MOCK POSTER

I created a mock poster based around one of my sketches on Adobe Illustrator. The poster is a rough version of what could be our final poster if we wanted to do a more linear style and design. This was based around Saul Bass' Anatomy Of A Murder poster in terms of both colour scheme and style. I was able to quickly put together this poster being already familiar with the program Adobe Illustrator, doing this has given me a better idea of what a poster in this style could look like.

The TYPEFACE was difficult to come by as most of the fonts available in Illustrator were too modern and clean-cut and therefore clashed completely with the style of the poster. I thought back to the Anatomy Of A Murder poster and other posters from around this time and realised that many had hand-cut typefaces. Being unable to find a downloadable font of this style I ended up drawing the font straight into Illustrator using similar ones to refer to. I decided that I liked the mixture of upper and lower case and so would incorporate this into it.

The COLOUR SCHEME was based around the Anatomy Of A Murder colour scheme with the neutral background contrasting with the bright red block and black type and figures. I thought it was important to have a border around the poster as it suits the style.

The FIGURES I tried to make look fairly abstract, whilst keeping the linear style. It was important that the figures kept a balance between looking disassembled but still obviously figures.

The RUBIK'S CUBE was aimed to be the centre of the poster where the eye is drawn to, I am not entirely happy with the distribution of the colours in the cube, but this could easily be altered if we decided to develop the poster.

I have left space for the BILLING BLOCK at the bottom of the poster.

These are the different layers I used to build up the poster that was made up of many different components. By using locks on the different features and layers it made the process of making the poster much more efficient.

TB

LWL MAGAZINE ANALYSIS

TB

POSTER SKETCHES

I have done some very basic sketches for 6 different poster ideas:

Quite a convention poster using a photograph that would need to be taken - there are no production stills of this kind. Photoshop would be used to change text on the boxes to titles and credits.

Based on Anatomy Of A Murder poster by Saul Bass. Sole use of graphics that are quite abstract and very simple. Quote from Saul Bass on his method for poster design is on the image above : "Simplify & Symbolize", this is what I have tried to do here.

One of our initial ideas based upon Eadweard Muybridge's "Nude Descending A Staircase".

The Marcel Duchamp version of "Nude Descending A Staircae", again one of our initial ideas.

The final of our initial ideas using the tree collage of 'an autistic brain' however tailored to our film.

An extremely conventional style of poster however with the cereal box separating the characters to make it slightly more interesting. Photoshop would be used to add titles and credits to the cereal box.

TB

ACTOR'S RELATIONSHIPS

By using a mother and daughter to play the leads in our short film we hope to capture that relationship with greater ease. Rachael & Amelie hopefully will be able to create the tense relationship that we need on screen, by having Amelie's mother there, there will be a responsible parent to discipline her if needed and help explain to her what we need her to do.

We feel they are an appropriate pair because they are both blonde and attractive, we want the audience to see beauty within the situation as well as upset and sympathy, Amelie isn't a bad child just a sad result of her disability. You can see a clear resemblance between them and because of their relationship there are many photos of them documenting times when both were younger so in the photos around the house and on the windowsill we can see the progression of time and a far younger Emma.

CREDITS TEST

I did a short test for a way of incorporating the credits into the objects within the shots. This test shows the actors name of Amelie on the cereal box when she is sitting behind out of focus.

I constructed this using Motion Graphics  for a Final Cut Title. I had to match the colours of the text to try to make it look as if it could actually be printed onto the cereal box. If we used this technique for our actual credits in our short film we would also have to use motion tracking to compensate for the slight camera shake, as this test shows the cereal box moves slightly whilst the text stays still. If this were the real thing I would also like to get the text to move with the box as Amelie pours cereal from it.

In motion I had to cover the original text on the cereal box with 2 shapes which I matched colour to the brown on the box. I then layered the text of the actors name over the top of the shapes and tried to make it look as similar to the rest of the text on the box as possible. Layers were key to use as they determined what was visible in the final test.

TB

TIME MANAGEMENT

HH

GRAPHICS RESEARCH

As I've mentioned in a previous post the film The Black Balloon has credits at the beginning that could suit our film quite well.

These graphics work well because they add depth to the shots, they are extremely simple, and the addition of the names of the objects in the shot is quite different and interesting.

A similar style is used in the film Stranger Than Fiction, the titles are more complicated however but are used similarly in an interesting way that relates to the film.

Gattaca has an extremely minimalist title sequence using a very basic blue colour palette and straight-forward which titles in a generic font. The style fits well with the film which is very sleek, minimal and simple, this title sequence is a perfect example of how the titles much fit in conjunction with the style of the film itself.

This is the famous Saul Bass title sequence for The Man With The Golden Arm. The use of the bars across the page work with the film since the bars are all skewed and disjointed, a reflection of the narrative of the film. This gave me an idea for our own titles as on the other hand to The Man With The Golden Arm, our film is a lot about the symmetry of some shots, therefore it could work for us to use bars in a similar way except have them all horizontal or vertical to highlight the symmetry.

Finally these are some titles created by Danny Yount for Semi-Permanent Portland. The graphics are beautifully composed and work well by intertwining themselves in with the objects within the shot. They also use lines and reflections to highlight the geometry and perfect symmetry of each shot. The titles themselves are fairly simple and use a modern typeface to match the style.

Having researched these different title sequences I feel that it will be important for our titles to work with the objects in the shot, rather than just look as if they have been stuck over the top. This will give the film a more professional look as well. Also I think it is vital that we use the titles to help our shots look composed and symmetrical, this was the aim for a lot of our film and rushing the titles with actually make the shots look worse.

TB

POSTER ANNOTATIONS

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