Monday 26 April 2010

Blue Haven Project Evaluation

Blue Haven started as an idea stemming from George Orwell’s 1984. My initial idea was based around the Horror genre, not the Political Psychological Thiller. The genre of Horror did still appeal to me even going through to the latter stages of planning, but I persisted with the baseline idea of 1984.
Once I had sorted what genre I was going to do my project around I started throwing some ideas around for a storyline. I then drafted up these idea in an earlier blog post as bullet points and rough background information. Once I had completed the draft I then finalised the idea of a Film Trailer, this then sparked up immediate interest in looking into other Film Trailers. In most cased this was a very useful task to undertake as this gave me some knowledge on standards used in the majority of Trailers. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to make anything like the Trailers that Warner Bros., Sony and Disney bring out as on the whole they have enormous budgets to spend on their filming thus being able to take scenes from a multi-million dollar movie. My budget however was zero. With having no budget I was unable to employ anyone so I was highly reliant on volunteers as actors and extras. This works well until you want to shoot a big scene, and then because you are relying on the kindness of people hearts, can lead to a bad scene being shot, or a complete change of camera angles. A situation of this type happened within my filming, but I will go into that a bit later on.

Propaganda had to influence my film in some way with it being about a political take over. I spent a few of my Media sessions looking at communist propaganda through the years. Surprise surprise it hasn’t really changed. The only way it has changed is the way it looks, with increased access to better facilities to create more extravagent imaging/design being a big help to this. I had got some ideas from Chinese and Russian Posters both old and new. The general concensus I got from these is that the majority of the posters were very simple but yet 100% (in most cases) effective. I drafted 5 posters of varying design but still very simple, mostly because the resources available weren’t overly extravagent, Microsoft Publisher was as far as I could go. But this was all I needed, a quick simple method of designing effective propaganda to add effect and realism to some of my scenes. These didn’t necessarily have to go in, but in order to attempt to immerse the viewer within the world of the movie; attention to detail can always pay off.

Once all the intial ideas of the movie were written down and I had a rather solid framework to build on I then started to look into how to ‘build’ a trailer. Now, under normal circumstances this would be a straightforward task, as the filming has already been completed and all there is left to do is selected good clips and put together a trailer that is in a sequence that is logical and able to keep the end viewer captivated. In regards to length there was no ‘real’ standard practice. Trailer lengths seemed to changed completely whether they were Theatrical Trailers i.e. shown in a cinema, or whethere they were just Trailers i.e. shown on TV adverts. They could vary from anywhere in the region of 10-15 seconds all the way to 3-4 minutes. My aim from this research was to create a Theatrical Trailer lasting around 2 minutes but under if necessary.
As for sequence within these trailers it varied dramatically there was never really any particular sequence, it all seemed to depend very much on the film. But, one thing that was always the same was the information contained within the trailer. There appeared to be the title of the film, in most cases a tag line, key actors, who the film was directed by, who produced the film, which company produced the film and last but not least when to expect the film to be released. To keep in common practices of creating movie trailers, surely within my trailer these had to be found. So within my script I added in a narration with these key points in, and also created titles for each point within the trailer itself as to emphasise them.



The next task was to create create a radio advertisement. When I put together my final trailer I imported the video and audio into Pro Tools (by Digidesign), as my background is with audio I thought I would be able to get better results using a professional standard medium rather than edit audio in iMovie, which is where all the video editing was done. As I had a full audio track from the trailer I thought it would be easier to take sections out of that to compile an advert together. I decided to make it shorter as in my personal opinion it is easier to keep someones attention with sound and picture rather than just sound. So I edited the advert in Pro Tools as in my own experience of audio editing you can get better results using a programme like Pro Tools than using a cheaper or less complex programme like iMovie.


We were then asked to create a homepage for our movie. I have had previous experience in web design using HTML and CSS to create websites, in this instance I didn't use this method. I decided to try using iWeb on a mac. Surprisingly I produced something effective and to the point in a very short space of time. I didn't make it too complex and cluttered as I thought doing this would be appealing on the eye at all. My page is very simple to navigate around, well contrasted, has the video trailer inbuilt in the website, a brief summary of the film and has links to facebook, twitter and youtube pages for the movie. (None of these links work as I only created the homepage). All these things can generally be found within other movies websites.


Overall I think my project went well, I had researched well looking at what other trailers/websites for films had in them, if I thought more about it I would of researched radio advertisement for film. I could of started it a bit quicker leaving more time for planning, filming etc, as previously explained there was a couple of occasions where camera angles had to be re-thought on shoot as not enough extras were present to make it as effective, but I managed to get something shot that gave the overall impression that I wanted. I probably could of spent more time on the website and given more time in utilising my prior knowledge of web design in order to make a more effective website, with possibly more pages rather than just a Homepage I also could of spent a little longer on the radio advertisement possibly adding in some more narration and editing slightly more carefully.
All parts to my project all appear to work well with continuity of titling and fonts used in both the trailer and the website, also there is all relevant information with all three that compliment each other.

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