A2 Short Film - Target Audience Reviews

We recently created a questionnaire for our audience, giving them six questions to answer about themselves and about the genre of film. This marketing was to help us get a better grasp of who this film would be seen by, and below are the most striking trends, the sex and age of the viewers:

Thriller films are generally placed at age 16A due to their quite often themes of violence, strong language or sexual content.
Therefore they are generally not suitable for a younger demographic.
Appealing to young adults thrillers and psycho-thrillers generally are very suspenseful and exciting films, and especially within the scope of psycho-thrillers generally are very intelligent films.

Therefore this challenge has been attributed more to the age range of 16-20. Unsurprisingly, the trend of the quiz shows this age range.

Thrillers, similarly with horror films, are generally anticipated to appeal more to the male demographic due to their often strong themes of fear and violence. 

But in reality our film is not geared towards any sex, and that is shown by the almost equal distribution within those who answered the target audience quiz. 

An intelligent and suspenseful has no colour for sex, but can, in fact, be enjoyed by any sex!

A2 Short Film - Final Poster

- - - 

- - -

A2 Short Film - Poster Edits

We recently received some audience feedback concerning our poster (which I will go into greater detail with in my Evaluation of this area) and the general consensus was negative, although generally unhelpful.

We were told that there was 'something' wrong with the poster, but something that the majority of our audience who was taking part were not sure of, so we tried our best to experiment with the poster to try and make it more aesthetically pleasing.

We tried a number of things, including shifting the composition, sharpening the image and increasing the saturation to bring out the red face of the clock more prominently. To the left is our attempt at this:

We also added darker shadowing under the writing to give it more depth. We liked this draft, but felt that it was not intense enough. we found that the blurring on the cracks of the clock presented the protagonist's internal white noise, and his confusion. We eventually darkened the poster again to give us the intensity that we wanted, shown below.

- - -

A2 Short Film - Preparing Our Review

As part of our A2 practical we are required to make a movie review in the format of a double page spread, something that would commonly be found in a magazine. Therefore, I have decided to research and plan ahead for this by taking some reviews from other websites to reference from and understand the general forms and conventions of this.

From my research I have noticed that there are a lot of different formats of film review, I have selected three different ones to look at and draw ideas from. 

This review of Twilight: New Moon is a single page, with the main feature being the screencast of the film with the text beneath. Limited colours are used so to keep the layout of the film review elegant and plain, but also to maximise how eye-catching it is.

The critical review, general overview of the film and actors are displayed on this review, which I think is a very concise and organised way to give the audience a taster of the film.

I dislike the layout of this review of 'The Cave'. The warm colours and dark shades of the photograph used do not fit very well with the blue backdrop and orange decal. The text is laid out well, but that does not make up for the lack of colour coordination.

This review of Agent Provocateur is my favourite. I like how the title of the film appears over the photograph used, and the way in which the different synopsis, critic quotes and general view is displayed. This is also a double page spread, which is what we are aiming for in our own review. I think that something similar to this would be very good to reference for our magazine review.

A2 Short Film - Final Poster Draft 1

- - -

- - -

A2 Short Film - Creating our Poster

As part of our A2 practical, we are required to make an advertising poster, similar to how the film would have it was created by an expert company.

The photo taken is the same clock that appears in the protagonist's room in the film itself, and after we were satisfied with our takes we took the clock aside to smash it (by standing on top of it) and allowing it to smash. We believed that this smashed clock would give the impression of a thriller movie, as most of the photographs used are of one and imposing feature, which of this we chose the clock.  To the right here is the smashed photograph of the clock that we edited, upping the contrast and adding a mild shine to bring out the red. We also added a grain to the left hand side to bring out the texture of the clock and lowered the saturation of the clock.




Our program of choice to bring our poster to life with was PhotoShop, courtesy of Adobe Creative Studio. Due to our severe lack of budget (that is, no budget at all) we banked on the seven day free trial and hoped that that would do. Then, scouring the internet we found a very attractive template to begin working on, and so our journey towards our film poster began.

To the right is a screenshot of us beginning to edit all of the details, allocating ourselves the roles as to how we worked on them. My own surname had to be shortened due to make the poster more aesthetically pleasing and so that the text did not feel too cluttered.

To the left here is our first final draft. We felt that there was something off about the poster, and felt that the tagline was too close to the middle of the poster, offsetting the viewer's look from the main focus of the clock, and that the proliferation of awards on the poster was too invading.

We tweaked the poster to give us our final version, which is seen below.

- - - 

A2 Short Film - Costuming

Commenting on the costuming of our characters, we asked the two protagonists, the man and the woman to dress in different way so to convey a multitude of different things.

For the main male protagonist, we asked him to come wearing darker clothes to present to the audience his internal and external isolation. His pyjama shirt was selected so that it would have red accents, a colour that would then become prominent in the profiling of our female character. For our protagonist this character could represent passion in the forefront as he reminisces over the memories with the female protagonist, but, on a second or third watch once the true intentions and standing of this character have been recognised this could come to represent danger instead. 

Our actor did very well in his costuming, wearing a dark coloured hoodie and plain jeans, with not too much decoration so to take away from the significance of colour. 

We gave a vague order of ''red'' to our female protagonist, and she delivered. She was dressed in several red things and even added an unplanned prop to our list. She game in red lipstick, a dress with minor red accents and a bright red suitcase to infer that she was travelling. The presentation of red here could be alluded to the desirable nature of the character to the protagonist.