Conventions of our chosen ancilliary products

Poster

A poster is a very important part of marketing a film, they are shown in places where the trailer cannot be, for example at bus stops or on cinema walls. They give the viewer an idea of what the film will be like within just one glance.

Common conventions of a poster are:

• It must be eye-catching and captivating to the audience
• There must be a focal picture that will draw in the audiences eye
• The title is displayed in a large, eye-catching font
• It clearly defines the genre of the film
• The poster should be designed to attract the largest audience possible of the correct nature
• There is usually an indication of when the film is being released; sometimes a specific date is displayed but usually a generic time of 'Coming Soon' or 'This Summer' is displayed
• Information about the Director and Production Company must be shown within the billing block usually placed at the bottom of the poster
• Sometimes reviews or titles of other films made by the same company are shown (From the makers of...)

Take ‘The Imitation Game’ poster for example;

Firstly the dim and dark photo and the red and white colour schemes would suggest a thriller or horror genre movie yet looking at the photo we don’t see any spooky or eerie happenings so it is likely that the film will not be a horror.

The title can be clearly seen at the bottom of the poster, it is in capital letters and coloured red which makes it stand out but also makes it memorable.

Just above the title we can see the two main characters names, not only does this increase the target audience due to a fan base but it also increases the standing of the film before anyone has even seen it because many people will assume that the film will be good because of the fantastic actors involved.

Underneath the title the date of release is displayed along with production company logos. This gives the viewer of the poster an idea of when to watch out for the film’s release and also gives credit to the production companies and distributors. 

At the top of the poster there is a tagline that reads, ‘The true enigma was the man who cracked the code’ which establishes to the audience that this movie will be based on the enigma code from WW2 but also that it will be about the man behind it all so perhaps the film will be a biography.

However, because our film is a horror then it would be wise to look up posters from horror films.

 Whilst looking at these I have come to realise that it is very common that the image used is a close up of the ghost/demon that is the antagonist in the film. This is quite useful for us as we too should consider taking a close up of Cassandra as a ghost to use for our film poster.

Again there is a common colour theme of red, white and black. Sometimes a hint of green where the movie contains themes of envy and jealousy which in fact our movie does contain elements of these so we might also consider a green tint.

Here I have created a plan for our own poster based on my research: 

Website

Websites are a vital component when creating a film because it is a place that the audience can visit to find out everything about the movie.

Common website conventions are:

• The Website needs to make sure that the design is effective and easily usable, it needs to be clear, logical and easily navigated
• The center of the website usually presents the main content with navigation tools to the left and/or accross the top containing links to pages with more detailed content
• Modern websites usually have technical codes containing moving images, sound and audience interaction. This is sometimes related to the content of a film marketing site which offer downloads such as music, posters or DVD's.
• As well as the content leading layout and design choice, where websites are based on existing genres the web design uses recognisable codes and conventions from the genres to make sure the audiences can recognise the genre and that they are framed to have certain expectations of the website.

I have taken a look at recent horror films website to get inspiration for our own website. Here is the home page for the website of Annabelle. 

I think that this is a really effective homepage because you can instantly see lots of information in one place. Very noticeable is the film title in red, it stands out to make it memorable just like the posters. You can also see the link with the movie, ‘The Conjuring’ which is very important for the makers of this movies as Annabelle is the prequel to The Conjuring and connecting the movie in this way increases the audience as fans of The Conjuring are likely to see this and then want to watch Annabelle.

We can also see DVD promotions which allow fans to find out where they can purchase a DVD copy of the film which increases the film’s overall proceedings. And finally there is a link to watch the trailer. 

Along the top there is an easy to use toolbar in which the user can navigate through the website. This is really useful and efficient because if the user couldn’t easily navigate the website then they would become irritated and leave however using a toolbar it is all there in one place.

On the end you’ll notice, there are various links to other social networking pages, and using social network in this way it allows fans to communicate across the globe which of course widens the audience but also brings across more awareness about the film, this has proven to be a very useful means of promoting a movie. 

At the bottom of every page on the website there is a credit list which includes the names and logos of the production companies but it also has the date in which the film is released and at the very bottom are links to terms and conditions and also further companies that must have worked alongside with Annabelle such as ‘MPAA’ and ‘Film Ratings’.

There is also an exciting link on the toolbar labelled, ‘Become Annabelle’ which sends you to a game that you can play. This interactive part of the website increases awareness of the film as viewers may suggest to friends that they should also play the game

Below I have designed a flowchart as to how I think the website should look according to what I have found out today:

Production Diary - 5/12/14

 This film shoot was definitely our biggest one because we had the most amount of actors together at one time. This meant that as the Producer I had to do a lot of extra work to get everyone together.

One of the main reasons that I found this a lot of work was the fact that as we are filming with children I had to organise everyone through their parents and I had to make sure that on the chosen date they could get picked up and dropped off or I organised to drive certain members of the cast.

Here are a couple of screenshots of my conversations with the parents;

However I finally manged to establish a day when every actor was free, Sophie had to come an hour later which meant that she would miss out on filming one of the scenes which we had to do before it got dark. Nevertheless we managed to put together a call sheet for the evening of filming:

The actual evening went really well and everyone looked great and in-character. I was definitely pleased with this film shoot because we didn't really come across any errors or problems and we managed to get all the shots done which is especially good because this means we don't have to arrange everyone to meet again.

The one minor problem we came across was that during the location recce we had found only one room suitable for the 1940's because it has wooden stools and wooden tables, however we had forgotten that it would have gone dark outside and that would ruin the reality of it being set during a school day, luckily Hannah came up with the idea of closing the blinds so that we couldn't tell how light it was outside. The picture below shows me and Hannah practicing the focus pull in that room. 

In the first scene that we filmed on this day one of the bullies rips a page from Cassandras book and we then show a close up of the ripped page. The page that we wanted ripping was of a drawing of her family and the page tears her family away from Cassandra. To ensure that when our actor ripped the page it was in the correct place we scored a line in the correct place using scissors.  

If we could do this shoot again I perhaps would have practiced the focus pull beforehand because this took up quite a lot of vital time and we had to do this section a lot of times only to get one decent shot. 

Behind the Scenes

Whilst conducting our latest film shoot we also decided to film a behind the scenes video.


North Chamber: Store Cupboard BTS from Sam Duxbury on Vimeo.

In this video, I as the producer outline what we are doing for the shoot and I also describe which props we used and why. We mainly filmed this so that we could add it onto our website because after looking at common conventions of a website we found that behind the scenes photos and videos are a very important aspect, especially when connecting the audience to the crew and cast members.

Production Diary - 26/11/14

On 26th November we asked Miranda to come into school and film her first scene which is when she finds the sketch book. As we were using the schools store cupboard it became extra tricky to plan out this shoot. 

For example, we needed permission from the caretaker to use the cupboard and we also needed to choose a day to film when he too was available so that he could unlock the room for us and supervise. 

Before our actor arrived we had a lot of work to do, for the lighting we had initially decided to use lamps because we thought that it would be very dark in the room, however these over-exposed the shots and we decided that the natural lighting from outside the cupboard made the footage more realistic too.

We also had to risk asses the area and remove dangerous item such as ladders and buckets of water. We also had to make a clear and safe path down the middle of the room. Here is a picture of all the hazards we had to clear away:

Finally we created the mise-en-scene which included creating a shelf of dusty old books, the dust was created by sprinkling wholemeal flour over the top of the books and we also hung a photograph of the 'old head-mistress' on the door of the cupboard. 

All this meant that once our actor had arrived we could begin filming right away. 

This is a screen shot of the call sheet that Sam Duxbury created for the events of the evening. 

I am really pleased with how well and smoothly this film shoot and I can't really think of any improvements that we could make because we were very organised with the pre and post preparation. 

Make-up

A very important aspect of the trailer is when Cassandra turns into a ghost, for this we needed to use make-up in order to make her look scary and freaky.

To begin with we used a very light foundation to make her face and neck look very pale and then blushed this over with white eye-shadow to further empathise the lifelessness.

We then proceeded to underline her eyes with red lipstick make her seem like she had been crying and this produced a worn out look and made her look tired. 

Finally we used a white contact lens in one of her eyes to add ghostly appearance to Cassandra to further emphasise that she is dead.

Here is Cassandra's finished look:

Production Diary - 19/11/14

On Wednesday 19th November we conducted our first film shoot. For this shoot we only used 1 actor, Kaitlyn who played the part of Cassandra. We decided to only shoot her individual shots as we knew that there were quite a lot of these and especially because our time is limited due to school opening hours, we didn't want to use up vital time when we had our other actors on set with scenes that only involve Cassandra.

I can drive so I went to pick up Kaitlyn from her school and brought her straight back to Bacup and Rawtenstall Grammar where Hannah and Sam had begun setting up the locations and preparing what Kaitlyn will wear based on our costume guidelines.

Here is Kaitlyns finished outfit:

I personally feel as though the outfit looks really effective and I am very pleased with the outcome, it definitely fits the 1940's style uniform we have researched about and kaitlyn really brings the character to life in this way.

Whilst filming one of the scenes which is by a window we suddenly realised that it had gone dark outside by the time we came to this scene which meant we couldn't film because our trailer is set in the day as it is supposed to be during school time, for the next film shoots we will bare this in mind and film any outside shots first whilst it is still light.

Other than that one mistake the rest of shoots went very well and the Red Herring Production team and I are very happy with the results.

Here are a couple of behind the scenes photos:

I have screen-shotted the call sheet which was produced by Sam Duxbury for this film shoot, I have edited out the phone numbers for privacy reasons:

Monologue

Coming up with the monologue much more difficult than we had expected, at first we tried to make it rhyme but this restricted what our sentences could involve. We came up with a couple of good rhyming words, for instance if the poem was going to be from Cassandra's point of views we though about using the word 'me' and rhyming it with 'evacuee'.

In the end we dropped the idea of the rhyming poem and suddenly ideas flew and we came up with a great monologue with an added bonus of some words rhyming;

Covered in dust

At the back of a cupboard

There is a book full of secrets

Soon to be discovered

In the North Chamber

She’ll find it there.

Cassandra’s book

Don’t touch it.

Beware.

KEEP OUT.

Monologue from Rebecca Ainsworth on Vimeo.

Props

Props are involved in the making of the mise-en-scene for any film, and there is a lot more to it than just placing something in the background to make the room look filled. Certain props can allow the audience understand about a character’s story without anything even being said. For instance, A half-eaten mouldy pizza on someone’s kitchen counter can instantly be read as them being a slob or lazy.

Sketch Book

In our own production there is a very important part of the film which will be Cassanra’s sketch book, through this the audience will see things about Cassandra’s life and thoughts without her even saying anything about it.

To create this book originally I asked my German teacher to borrow a spare exercise book which looks like this;

Hannah, Sam and I then found two of our friends who take Art A-level and kindly asked them to draw some pictures of war and depression however when we looked at the finished result we were not very happy, the drawings didn’t match our interpretation of Cassandra which cannot be helped as we are the people who created her character whereas our friends didn’t understand Cassandra like ourselves. Furthermore, the drawings were done in black felt tip and we realised that Cassandra would not have owned felt-tips back in the 1940’s.

Having thought about the period aspect we also decided that the book itself looked too modern so we looked on the internet and found a much better old-fashioned book which is in fact a genuine exercise book from the 40’s.  The pages have a slight yellowy tint to them, there is rust on the hinges and there is no margin line, this makes the book look more authentic. 

However, we only ordered the book from eBay on Wednesday 12^th November and was due to arrive on 19^th November which was too close because we have planned to do our first film shoot on the 19^th. Therefore I emailed Lesley, the woman who I bought the jotter from, and she very kindly sent it in first class for us and I have now received it. It looks amazing and so much better than the previous jotter.

Fountain Pen

In the 1940’s people would write with fountain pens or feather and ink pens therefore we have asked around and Hannah owns a feather pen with a pot of ink and I own some fountain pens and ink cartridges. We will use these to write in the jotter as this is what Cassandra would have actually used.

We used a mix of blue ink and black ink and I love the pages, they really show Cassandra's character and inner-self. Also Hannah and I found out that we can be quite artistic after all.

Here are some photos during the process of drawing in the book. 

Wholemeal Flour

In one of the modern day scenes, Scarlett walks into an old cupboard and discovers lots of old exercise books, including Cassandra’s book. In order to make the books look old and dusty we will use wholemeal flour to act as dust.

Extra Books

Within the same scene we also need many other old-fashioned books to be on the shelves in order to make the scene look realistic. I have found a couple of old books that my mum has kept from past generations. 









I also we have found an old photograph of my great aunt which we shall have hanging on the inside of the store cupboard and this can be used as a photography of the old head teacher during the war period.

Also we asked around and we were allowed to use some of the actual school’s book from the past which are kept in BRGS’s archive cupboard. This was great as we found exercise books dating back to the 1940’s and also we found old versions of the schools magazine, ‘The Squirrel’.

Fake Blood

We are going to use fake blood in a number of scenes, one where we see blood dripping into the sink, making it evident to the audience that Cassandra has cut herself and another scene where Cassandra drops her blood onto the hand of Scarlett.

Bag

During one of the scenes Scarlett looks through her bag and takes out Cassandra’s sketch book and for this we will need a modern day school bag.