Our film; A One Man War

Radio trailer:

Production; film poster

In what ways does your media product use, develop and challenge the conventions of real media products?

How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?

The combination of our main product (film) and the ancillary texts such as the poster and the radio trailer for our film were very important. The poster and radio trailer will help to promote our film to our target audience, and so both needed to be very effective in the way it attracted our target audiences.

We used various media languages such as camera angles/ movements and sounds effects to communicate with our audience. In one of our scenes, we thought it will be interesting to add a montage in order to make the scene of our actor getting prepared for school look exciting and not dragging on. We merged clips of our main actor getting dressed and working out to create a montage. We used close-up shots and not long shots to make the clips more interesting and to allow our audience to guess what he is doing. This will creates suspense as the audience would want to find out what is happening, and they will carry on watching it until they find out. We also added a very energetic and dramatic sound clip in our montage to enhance excitement to the scene.

In our film we used binary opposition. We have students vs. a teacher. We challenged the stereotypes of characters as we perceived the children as the ‘bad guys’ and the teacher as the ‘good guys’ the children are usually presented as being innocent and the teacher is fearless and uptight. Not only would it be useful to help establish the relationship between the two, but it also make our film very appealing to our audience, as it may be something they feel they can relate to.

Our target audience are quite young, so it is important for us to make our film clearer to this particular group. In our film we added a lot of things such as objects, signs and symbols to denotate that our actor is an ex-soldier. Using our creativity, we looked for objects as well as gestures we could use to give an impression to our audience that our actor is an ex-soldier who returned from the military. It is important that audience understands that our protagonist is an ex-soldier because he is also a teacher. So, to not create confusion between the two roles we made it things clear by using objects, clothing and the different gestures he uses to bring out his character.

Poster:- 

To make our poster appealing to our audience we decided to use strong, dark, striking and dramatic colors to draw our audience’s attention to our film. We decided to add images of our protagonist, images of the school building and also images of explosives in the background to enhance the idea that his from the military. The images of explosions in the background will also make our poster visually eye-catching to our target audience.

In our poster we are going to include a tagline ‘One man must stand alone to face his fears’ this will make our poster stand out from the rest with the addition of our unique tagline. The tagline is going to be in bold and it’s going to have to stand out from the poster in order for our audience to read it. Our tagline creates a sense of fear and suspense and makes our film look really interesting.

Radio Trailer:- 

Our radio trailer is also really important for the promotion of our film. From the radio trailer our audience will be able to get a glimpse of what our film is about. The layers of different sounds help to create a particular mood for our film and make our film sound exhilarating and exciting. We used sound clips of a soldier chanting, children screaming, explosions and fast-pace music and heart beats to create a dramatic sequence of sounds. The sequence of dramatic sounds will have a great impact on our audience as it will lure our audience to watch the film.

Our trailer creates suspense immediately as we hear continuous heart beats, a soldier chanting and children screaming. A voice over then says ‘teach them a lesson’. After a few seconds of silence we hear sounds of explosions with fast-pace and energetic music playing, slowly building tension. We then hear another voice over ‘one man must stand alone to face his fears’, this creates fear and unease for the audience as they will be wondering what is going on. The sound track becomes really dramatic going at a fast pace and we hear more explosions. We hear another voice over ‘will this be his last battle’ this causes the audience to worry and creates a lot of suspense. The voice over then continues to say ‘starring Olu Oseiende’, ‘Numero Uno presents A Man One War’, ‘Coming to cinemas near you’, ‘rated PG’ and then the trailer finishes with a loud crash of explosion. I personally feel that this trailer will have a great impact on our audience and on our film as it will make our film very appealing and ‘watch-worthy’ after listening to the trailer.  

What have you learnt from your audience feed back?

The survey we produced before creating our film was very significant in terms of informing us of what our target audience wanted, what they looked for in a drama, what kind of endings they preferred and how they wanted the film structured out. The feedback was a great help as it helped us to improve on the little things that will have a great impact on our film. The whole point of a feed back is to find out what would satisfy our audiences and, all in all help us produce a successful film.

We used survey monkey to create and publish our survey to our target audience. We used web 2.0 to get access to facebook and other sites in order to reach our target audience and get the responses. These were the responses we received:-

Results from our survey

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Post-production; This is the feed back we received after the film was made.

Student;

Good points:

§         They understood the plot of the story, it was clear

§         It was easy to understand what was going on

§         They were anxious at first of what was going on – whole point of our film

§         They identified the teacher/solider

Bad Points:

§         Some clips were too long

§         Needs to be more clearer

§         More clear emphasis on military themes

§         More sound tracks

Person 2;

Good points:

§         Good use of camera angles

§         Story line is clear

Bad Points:

§         More emphasis needed on the actor as a solider

§         Need more military themes

§         Montage needs to be shorter

Feed back from our target audience is significant because our main aim of our film is to make I appealing for our target audience. So in order to satisfy our audience we needed to make sure where we were going wrong with our film and what needed to be improved. All the feed back we got was very crucial for our film as it helped tells us what needed to be fixed and where we were going wrong. We acted upon all our audience feed backs and made sure that we acted upon all the areas that needed to be fixed. 

How did you use media technologies in the planning, research, construction and evaluation stages?

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Radio trailer; Script:

[Heartbeat] 
[Screaming children- at the same time a man is chanting and army song]
Voice over:The time has come to teach them a lesson.
[Explosion]
Voice Over: One man must stand alone to face his fears... 
[Music and gun shot begins]
Voice Over: Will this be his last battle?
[Music gets more louder - continuous music throughout]
Voice Over: Starring Olu Sodeinde...Numero Uno presents, A One Man War...
Coming to cinema near you, soon.
Voice Over: Rated PG
[Loud crash/explosion - Music dies out]

Audience feedback

This is a video of our student response.. I asked a couple of questions and received important feed back for our film. For example, this student mentioned that we should make our montage even shorter. After receiving the feed back we then made a few changes to our film in order to meet our target audiences needs and to make our film successful.

Research and planning – Radio trailer

We are currently working on our radio trailer for our film. I've done some research into finding something similar to our idea for our radio trailer. It was really hard and took a lot of time to find a perfect one, but this came closet to our ideal radio trailer. This trailer contains different layers of sounds, there is peoples voices in the background, they're panicking and shouting which builds tension and suspense. The sound track used here is really striking and dramatic and it very effectively creates a dramatic atmosphere. Instead of having a huge array of voices in the background, we're planning to have a voice over (dramatic and sarcastic voice over). We want our radio trailer to contain a sound track similar to this, in order to create suspense, terror, anxiety and to make the audience feel agitated. This is effective as it will drag the audiences attention and make them anxious to find out more about the film.

Production: Editing; opening title

Today we have worked on combing all our animations together using the software final cut. We had encountered   some problems. Because we worked individually on our animations we had a lack of proper communication and mine and Tahmina's work which was meant to go together (the titles, title typing and then title shattering), came out in different font sizes. So, we had to figure out how to fix it. We had a professional BBC Production assistant who helped us overcome our problems. We had other problems, also, our animation when put together kept on over lapping each other, so we had to fix it.

Production: Editing film:

I was given the role to edit some of the shoots for our film. This gave me the opportunity to work on final cut and learn editing skills. I had learnt how to render clips, import clips on to final cut, how to shorten clips, how to use the timeline, how to remove sound clips or how to insert sound clips and how to change the effects. I have thoroughly enjoyed doing this and learnt many editing skills from this process. 

Production: animation for opening title

Production: Filming - Day 4

Today we started shooting our first scene of our film. It was important that we booked our locations and sorted out what props we were going to need. Also, importantly we had told our actor few days earlier of the day we were going to film, so that he was aware of it and prepared. We needed a bedroom, but we used a music studio instead. Using our creativity skills, we got enough props such as blankets and pillows to make the sofa we were using, a bed. It looked believable. When filming we made sure that we only got the particular parts we wanted and had to make sure that the back ground didn’t reveal the music studio too much.

We also worked on our third scene again to take the remaining shots for the journey to the school. We used a wide variety of camera angles and shots. We took a distant shot; we did panning shots and close-up shots of our actor making his way to the school. 

Practicing making animation

Using Flash, i practiced making animations. I practiced making motion animations and i was overall happy with my effort. I have successfully learnt how to make a motion tween animation.

Production: Filming - Day 3

Today me and my group set out to shoot our classroom scene. We had some bits and bobs left to film for our classroom scene. Firstly, we needed to film from a wide variety of angles including long shots of the classroom, close-up shots of the mischievous student and panning shots of the classroom. It was important that we took a series of different shots so that when we edit our shoots, we can pick and mix the best camera angles for that scene. This will enable us to use our creativity skills by planning on how a particular scene should look like, also making our scene look interesting. Me and Sufia both worked on scene three – the journey, the teacher makes his way to the school. For this scene we just took a couple of shots of the school surroundings. Overall, i improved my filming skills and my use of camera shots and angles and enjoyed myself. 

Planning: Movie poster

As a group we have decided what we're going to be working on in the next few weeks. We have to work on getting our trailer and poster of our film created, as well as editing our film clips using final cut. We decided that in our fours we are going to split the two tasks between two groups of two, two of which who are going to be working on the poster and the other two are going to work on the trailer. We decided that we are all going to have our inputs, listening to each others ideas for each task and we are going to use our creativity skills to bring out an excellent movie poster and a movie trailer. Me and Sufia chose to work on the poster, and we used our ideas, as well as the other members ideas to decide on how our poster is going to look like. I have made a plan of our poster, but it is yet to be completed. I have roughly drawn our main actor, and of what he will be wearing.

This is a rough idea of how our main actor is going to be dressed. We decided that our main actor is going to be wearing a dull green blazer (or brown) to emphasis his from the military. His going to have a strap of grenades on him which is going to be revealed slightly. Also, his going to be carrying a side bag.

Research: research on various film posters

I have done some research and identified some of the features of movie posters. I then looked at what features the movie posters had in common with other posters. As there are tons of old and new movie posters it will be hard to gather all the similar features. From this process I will learn what kind of common features each and every poster contains, which makes it eye-catching. I could look at the most popular new ones and look at people reviews to see what they liked about it.  

Old movie posters:

  

This is a poster from 1999, not very old but, as you can see lots of effective presentational elements have been used to make the poster eye-catching. The film is set in a desert, and the colours of the font and the background emphasises on this.

• Both posters have a use of striking colours that make each poster noticeable.
• Both posters present the main characters in the film. These days’ movie posters only include a few or just the main actor in the poster. 

Current and new movie posters: 

These posters have the same conceptual design. They are really eye-catching and stand out. The silhouette of the actors contains the name of the film in the centre. 

It’s interesting to note that these days move posters have a large emphasis on the main actor; where the actor is enlarged on the movie poster with other things around them. Many posters are being created in the same generic layout, like these for example: both posters have an actor in the middle of two huge buildings; they also have their back to the camera. This is effective as makes the audience anxious to find out who they are. I have read some reviews, and many people (age not specified) have said that they found the following two posters very eye-catching. These posters are similar to our ideal poster, of a man in standing in front with lots going on in the background. This shows that are ideas are easily going to relate to modern posters which will attract lots of audiences from the young generation. And, our film is targeted at a young audience, ages 7-16.

Research: On our poster step 1

The poster of a movie is an important extension of a film. The layout of the poster is very similar to our ideas of our film poster. We are using the same layout of the poster; with chaos in the background and our main actor in the front walking away from the disaster. To make it look creative and add suspense, as well as humour, we’re going to make our actor dressed as a teacher, underneath his blazers will be a strap of grenades and he will be walking away from a war scene. Also, to add humour, we are going to have a little girl standing the in the background, in the middle of the mess staring out of nowhere, lost and confused like a zombie.   

What makes this poster especially out of the ordinary and striking is the use of the dark, dull and mood-dropping colours which reflects the theme of the film. The image in the background, especially, is what makes the poster stand out and attention grabbing; there are pictures of broken buildings, car tipped over and buildings covered with large sheets. This all adds to effect of making the poster look surreal. The image of the man by himself, above all, adds to my fascination, and the description which reads ‘the last man on earth is not alone’ makes me as an audience feel anxious to find that what that means, and makes me feel tempted to go and watch the film and find out.