Ancillary Tasks - Image Analysis

When considering my magazine cover, I had many different ideas for the picture that would feature on it. When filming, we decided that the best looking picture would be one like the one featured, and so we took many similar photos of this one. There were some subtle, but important differences in these photos though. We started with the shutter (behind me) all the way down to the floor, but then decided that it looked too plain. We then moved the shutter up, but realised that if we had this new addition of light coming through at the bottom, we should do something with it; with this in mind, we put the hammer featured in the film down next to me as it is a fairly big part of the trailer - this could hint at what is in the film/trailer for some readers of the magazine. Finally, we also had my character not looking at the camera, so that it looks almost as if he is scared of something not visible to the audience - this would help convey the genre of the film.

The original, unaltered picture that was used in my Magazine cover.

After deciding on the photo I wanted to use, I took it into school to use Photoshop to edit the picture effectively. It took me a little while to get used to the different features of Photoshop, however I eventually understood each tab and how to make it look like I wanted. I installed the same font used in my trailer for the film's title - as this created synergy and many film magazine's do this too (for the exact same reason). Many different magazines all show their price in a smaller font at the top on the front cover. This is so the potential reader can see how much the magazine will cost, but after reading most of the other text and possibly generate interest in buying the issue. Also there were a lot of issues of different magazines that featured different sections of the magazine on the left/right of the front cover. This gave the the idea to do the same and have different sections of the magazine being described on the right of the cover. This is so that if a potential reader is unsure of whether to get the magazine or not, this will hopefully engage them more and they will end up buying it. Finally, some issues of Empire had a block at the top/bottom of the cover for other features in the magazine to be put in, I liked this and tried to put this in my original cover.

An example of the layout of an Empire magazine front cover - with different features on the right and the title of the main feature on the left.

The blocks at the top and bottom for other features being used effectively by Empire magazine.

My original cover.

After creating this and receiving feedback from the class, I decided that the cover was too light and the white block at the top didn't suite the cover at all. With this in mind, I looked at other issues of film magazines for ideas - in many issues of Empire that I looked at, the main characters take up most of the front cover, to the point that they usually overlapped the title of the magazine a little. This suggests that the magazine is so well known that they don't even need to have their title fully showing on every cover, as well as making the film seem like the most important feature of the magazine. I did the same with my improved version of my magazine cover, in the hope that it had the same effect. This was quite hard to get the hang of on Photoshop, but after watching some walkthrough videos on Youtube and asking friends how to do it, I managed to get used to it.

An example of an Empire front cover that has certain parts of the characters overlapping the text.

So I managed to put my head in front of the text for the magazine cover, however it was still too light and some text was hard to read because of this. I spent a little while playing around with the contrast and brightness of the whole picture and manged to achieve a darker 'tone' in the picture. I still wasn't happy with it, until I stumbled upon the idea of blurring the image behind the text and having me as the only thing that was clear in the picture. I found this amazing because it made the text stand out so much more and made me focus on me more than the other things in the picture. I marked around me and the hammer on the floor, so the rest was blurred out a little to make the text stand out - creating the final product (at the top of the blog post). I felt that the cover looked a lot darker and more menacing, while also highlighting the different features inside the issue, and so it is a massive improvement on the original version.

This is my final poster, when I was trying to come up with ideas for a poster, I looked at a number of horror film posters. There were a number of different types of images used - among them was a medium close up of the main character looking directly at the audience; a long shot of the main character in a vulnerable position (maybe on the floor) and maybe a shadow of a threat above them; and two or more main characters comforting each other while looking at a threat off-frame. The most common one seemed to be of the actual antagonist in the film: e.g. Pennywise the Dancing Clown from It (1990), Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Dalton from Insidious(2010). But I didn't like this idea due to the fact that there are no zombies seen in my teaser and I always think that it is much scarier to leave things to the imagination - a perfect example of this is the infamous 'shower scene' from Psycho (1960), no shots contain the knife being plunged into Marion, only cutaways are used when the knife comes down towards her - this scene is still extremely shocking nowadays, even without us seeing the actual murder take place onscreen.

An example of a medium close up of the main character looking at the audience.

I liked the idea of two characters comforting each other and immediately started to come up with different ideas of how to shoot this. A couple of examples of our tester shots are below.

 







On the day of filming, we took the shots that I had in mind and neither me, nor Adam (the photographer) particularly liked them. So we started thinking of other ways of capturing the right image of the two characters comforting each other. We came up with the idea of trying to find part of the actual trailer that we could re-create and shoot - maybe when Anna is dying and Jack is holding her? We started to go through the trailer step-by-step, but after re-creating this first shot, we saw the photo and decided that this was the perfect thing to shoot as it could look as if we are scared of something inside the building (unlike the actual teaser), giving a perfect snapshot of the feelings that we wanted to make the audience feel when watching the teaser. Then I thought that I could have the text on the wall to the left of frame, this was because the wall was white and quite plain (apart from the odd crack), perfect for text to be placed on there - I felt the shutter to the right of frame was a little 'too plain' due to the absence of cracks and slightly different colours that the wall had. Also, because we read from left to right, we naturally look at the top left corner first when we look at something - this means that the audience would read the title of the film first. Below are some more photos from when we were trying to get the right angle of this image.

I took the image that we liked the most into school and used Photoshop to edit it until I had created the final poster. It took a little while due to the fact that I wanted to add in a fade to black on the left side of the image. This shouldn't have taken too long, but we had forgotten to take a white bucket out of the shot, so I spent a long time trying to fade the image in a way that wasn't too abrupt, but still took the white bucket out of the photo.

I then set to work adding in all of the necessary text. I looked at a lot of similar posters and tried to follow their conventions. I wanted to keep the font the same as in the film to keep the synergy across all the media platforms - I noticed that many different industry examples did the same. In nearly all posters there is also a credit block (usually at the bottom). I downloaded the specific font that real products use, then wrote my own credit block for the bottom of my poster. Many other posters also had a tagline of sorts to accompany the film title; this generates more interest as it gives the audience a little more information on what the film might be about.

Due to the trailer being a teaser trailer, I thought that the poster should be a little similar. This made me decide to have 'Coming Soon' on the poster, rather than an exact date/time - this is the same as in the main task. Many different industry examples used this too: teaser posters with no definitive date, when later posters may well have a scheduled date on them.

After receiving feedback from the class and looking at more industry examples, I noticed that usually a tagline would be smaller then the main title of the film, and I needed to add some logos to the credit block. This then became the final product (towards the top of this section of the blog post).