We have now finished our practical project and I am presenting the evaluation of our portfolio on this blog. Using our individual skills sets to create our media coursework, we have successfully created not only an authentic action movie teaser trailer, but three realistic and professional looking movie posters and a movie magazine front cover, all featuring our fictional action movie ‘Precognition‘.
We have achieved this by looking at many of the conventions used in action movies of the past; from modern action epics to 80‘s blockbusters. We looked at many of the different conventions this genre of film follows, and the different ways in which we could create a new and interesting idea for an action film that would attract an action audience. From the beginning of our project we researched into the different conventions films like these used when it came to characters, setting, story, effects and many other different elements of the action film. We used the research we found to mould our own action movie teaser trailer and the aspects of the genre we wanted to include, as well as the conventions we thought we needed to follow. As our film was based around precognitions and the idea of ;‘future sight‘; we found it was quite similar to films such as ‘Next’ with Nicolas Cage, The ‘Final Destination’ Series and
We found that there were many of these different films being produced with similar themes. As a group we researched the conventions films like these had specifically and found that there were plenty we needed to follow, but also plenty we wanted to challenge. To start with, we found that these films often had almost too much action in them; they focused on action scenes rather than the story themselves and although usually the idea of these films starts of as very clever and intriguing, they often all end in some kind of blurry, conventional plot ending that doesn’t make a lot of sense to the story and disappointed viewers; we found this out from actually having watched this type of film ourselves and reading reviews on the Internet. We felt that we needed a more unconventional story, something that was a little bit darker, a story where the protagonist is a lot darker as a character and not the immediate hero the audience might expect. We wanted a film that was similar to ‘The Dark Knight’, featuring a protagonist (in this case Batman/Bruce Wayne, played by Christian Bale) who was not the immediate hero and often struggles to do good, as well as a character that defiantly is not the protagonist (The Joker, played by Heath Ledger) but is someone that the audience can connect with and enjoy watching, even though he is traditionally the villain of the story. We decided to create a protagonist that didn’t follow the typical action movie conventions and was a different type of protagonist that is not immediately seen by the audience as the “hero”.
We also felt that we needed to look some of the conventional settings that action films used. We found that most action films used city settings to base their story around. Looking at films like ‘Die Hard’, ‘Terminator’ and again ‘The Dark Knight, all of these films were successful in using a city location for their plot and we felt that this was a convention that we wanted to follow. We decided that a seedy city setting would be perfect for our teaser trailer and eventually we found a great local location that we could use. We decided that even though some actions films work well in other settings, such as in jungle or country locations, our film would work perfectly in the city. The location we eventually chose was also a very dark and seedy place at night, we wanted to replicate the kind of setting we saw in other action films. We felt that a dark (night time) and empty location surrounded by large buildings would be an eerie and interesting setting for our teaser trailer; somewhere that would attract and intrigue the audience.
When it came to the Posters, as a group we looked at several example posters from films in the action genre. In our planning process, we decided that we wanted a series of three posters that were similar in theme, and could be easily recognisable; we decided that we needed some kind of house style/font to use, and created a recognisable font for the movie title and used similar fonts for the credits on the poster that almost every other movie poster has. We took these conventions from other movie posters we saw; they usually had the same theme and often looked very similar in house style. They all had similar layouts and we felt that in our project we needed to create posters that had their own house style, as well as being similar in layout; we used some of the ideas from the posters for ‘The Dark Knight‘ in which they have a series of similar styled posters that show different characters from behind. Although we used these conventions, we also challenged the conventions of the way in which images were used in the posters. We decided to use ‘arty’ filters and different lighting to create more mysterious images that would possibly attract a new type of audience. We wanted again, very dark and ‘seedy’ looking images. We found that this worked effectively and looked very professional.
We used exactly the same process whilst creating our movie magazine cover. We felt that we needed to follow the conventions other magazines such as ‘Film Magazine’ and ‘Empire’ used. We used a large image centered on the cover just like these magazines use when featuring a certain film. We also used the same house style/font we used for the posters so that people would recognise that it was the same film. We didn’t want to challenge any of these conventions for the movie magazine as we found that they worked well with what we were trying to do (if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it!).
Our movie ‘package’ worked well, and we felt as a group that we made it very clear that they were all from the same film (Precognition). We did this by taking the still images we needed for the posters and magazine cover at the same time we filmed for our teaser trailer. That way, they would all look similar, having the same setting, character and theme. As stated before when talking about the conventions of these types of movie packages, we wanted to use a consistent house style so that every part of the package would be easily recognisable as the same film, precognition. After designing an authentic looking movie title with a house font, we used it in each part of our package to reinforce the idea that it was all from the same film; using the same title in all of our posters and our movie magazine, as well as using it at the end of our teaser trailer. We decided that image of our Protagonist with a gun in his hand would be great to use as a theme for our posters and magazine cover. As this features at the end of our trailer (our protagonist gets a gun out), we felt that it would be a consistent and interesting image to use; changing the image only slightly in style each time. We also wanted to use dark colours and images to represent our film in the same way. The combination of using these similar and consistent images, house styles, fonts and colours meant that our main product (teaser trailer) went well with our ancillary texts (posters/magazine cover) and worked as an effective combination. I think that people would easily recognise all of the products as being part of the same package.
To make our products available to a wide audience, we decided that ‘You tube’ would be a great way of sharing our teaser trailer everybody that wanted to view it, and not only our examiners and teachers. We felt that this would no only allow people to view our work, but give us feedback on the product itself via comments and views. I think that any feedback from people you don’t know is good, even if it isn’t the positive feedback you may have wanted. We have a couple of very positive comments on our trailer already that praise our work, but also give us some constructive criticism. This includes a comment about shooting at night; if we were ever to do it again, we have been told that better lighting would be a good idea as the quality of the product is compromised in the dark. Apart from using you tube, ‘Blogger’ has been the key platform in presenting my coursework. Using this blogging tool, I have been able to effectively present the practical work as well as this evaluation. It is an effective form of Internet posting that has allowed people to follow my work, and comment on the work I have put on gradually throughout the term.
Creating this practical portfolio would have been impossible without the used of media technologies to help us construct our work. First off, the use of the Internet was key in not only our media research, but also in presenting the finished work itself. We used this tool a lot when researching action movies and their conventions; it helped us to shape our product and start to plan our teaser trailer and posters. Without the Internet I think it would have been a lot harder and a lot more time consuming to create a project like we did.
We researched into different films, including using YouTube to watch several action movie trailers, accessing movie posters from IMDb and looking at the covers of movie magazines on their websites. I obviously used the Internet for one the the key presentation elements of my coursework this year as well. i used Blogger to present and post my coursework online as well as providing links to our own movie teaser trailer itself. It was very easy to use and a vital tool when it came to writing about our portfolio. On top of this, we used the site YouTube to present the actual trailer itself. It is a free video sharing website which allowed us to easily upload and present our 'Precognition' trailer to everybody who visited the site. This also allowed us to link the video to our blogs.
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